MOVIE REVIEW: Kissing Candice

Drama that is set in a border town along the Republic and Northern Ireland.Â A Policeman’s daughter is struggling with living in the one horse town with little to do and nowhere to go, she has a dream of a young man who she believes is her destiny, but doesn’t know his name.Â Her father struggles with a missing boy case and is sure that a local gang of youths is involved, and is distressed, to say the least, when Candice finds her dream guy who is part of this group.

For months an Elderly fellow reviewer has been talking to me about the director of this film, he praises this young woman highly for her U2 video for Every Breaking Wave, and her TV adverts for major brands.Â More than this though he tells me that she is a pleasant young woman with exceptional manners.Â Her name is Aoife McArdle and she is the writer and director of this film.Â As this is the first feature she is responsible for there is a certain learning curve that has to be taken into account.Â Everyone has to start somewhere I guess.

With all that being said I can tell you that she has the ability to capture a scene unlike most directors who have been going through this game for many decades than she has been alive.Â The sprawling landscape of the border town/county which seems to have suffered under what people outside Ireland call ‘The Troubles’ is stunning.Â Showing that just outside the town there are many places where isolation can be your friend or enemy, and then in the blink of an eye there is another scene that shows the town as a claustrophobic noose around the characters necks.Â The setting of these pieces are a credit to the writer and director and offer that hope of her future ventures.Â Where the film falls flat on its face is the script, it’s bumbling and disjointed, for a moment you’ll be captivated by a string of story and then it disappears like a trap door under your feet.Â Also the cast is filled with actors who aren’t really given enough purchase in the script to have a their character developed to any point that you care about what happens to them.

There is a supernatural element to the film that just doesn’t work as it’s not ventured into enough to have an impact on the viewer.Â I wanted to love this film, but it’s just not there, it’s like a half-baked muffin, where the top appears to be all glorious and you can eat it, and yet all that lies beneath is just sludge.Â It may taste ok to some but it’s far from a Muffin.

McArdle is in her twenties, and with some script help in the future, or working with someone else’s material, she may become one of the greats of Irish cinema.Â Kissing Candice shows promise but delivers very little to yard.Â I will wait for her next project eagerly and hope that I can score it higher than this film.

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