by Rich Cross
After picking up a slew of awards on the film festival circuit, writer-director Joe Bartone’s darkly humorous study of the disastrous life choices of a trio of amoral slackers will find an appreciative cinephile audience as a word-of-mouth movie-on-demand. Bartone, who also produced the film and wrote its immersive score, constructs his screenplay with more than a nod to Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, Alex Cox’s Repo Man and even David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. The result is an impressively distinctive film, more concerned with its ensemble of oddball underachievers and focused on the disappointments of their precarious existence than with advancing a traditional plot.
In the fringes of Los Angeles, feisty young woman George ekes out an existence through hustles and petty criminality. Together with her partners in crime, Renka (a sparky street skater) and Kai (an easy-going stoner), they live day-to-day by relying on scams. Reluctant to make the effort to try for a better life, they prefer the comforting pleasures of drugs, booze and sex. But when an ill-conceived burglary ends in a householder’s death, their rootless existence is thrown into even greater chaos. Worse still, George is now haunted by an ethereal, judgemental ghost.
Bartone uses the backstreets and parks of LA to frame the inconsequential interactions of his characters in ways that bring the city to life. He depicts them as individuals lost in an endless, anonymous urban sprawl which suffocates aspiration. The script is careful not to romanticise these hapless, self-sabotaging protagonists or to excuse their sometimes cruel and nihilistic behaviour. And despite the film’s upbeat title, there’s as much tragedy and loss as there is hope in Bartone’s unformulaic and rewarding tale.
EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE IN THE END is available to stream in the UK on Prime Video.
