A lot of films have tried to do their own version of the plot of 1993’s “Groundhog Day,” the first Hollywood feature that combined videogame-play rules (the hero is stuck in a time loop, and if the clock runs out or he dies, he starts over) with earnest fantasies of self-improvement (he learns from his mistakes and carries that knowledge into the next go-round). There’s also been a related mini-trend of small-scaled science fiction movies that deal with ruptures in time and/or space and apply them to the lives of everyday people. There were several such films at South by Southwest last year, including “The Greatest Hits,” “Things Will Be Different,” and “Omni Loop,” all of which I reviewed. This year brings “One More Shot,” which is set on New Years’ Eve, 1999, during the Y2K panic.
Directed by Nicholas Clifford and written by Alice Foulcher and Gregory Ernstein, it’s about a young woman named Minnie (Emily Browning) who goes to a party that’s also attended by her beloved ex-boyfriend Joe (Sean Keenan) and his new girlfriend Jenny (Aisha Dee). Jenny is one of the only people at the party who wasn’t part of the same university clique. Another is a hospital orderly who calls himself C-Word (Hamish Michael) and who, to the delight of other guests, brought cocaine. C-Word keeps hitting on Minnie throughout the party, and you start to wonder if eventually Minnie is going to start liking him in that way, just because Joe is such a mess in so many ways (and so is she). She does give him a chance, but not in that way.
It’s hard to describe the events in this movie without killing whatever surprises it might hold, because the entire story is fragmented by the introduction of a time travel element: Minnie brought a special bottle of tequila with her, and once she discovers that drinking it presses a cosmic reset button and starts the night over, she begins treating the event the way Bill Murray’s character treated the eponymous holiday in his movie: as a real-life videogame to be played over and over and over in hopes of claiming the ultimate prize, a reunion with Joe.
It would be nice to report that there’s more to it. But there barely is, aside from some brutal bits of slapstick violence that temporarily mar the heroine’s face and body with bruises and blood. The characters, Minnie especially, learn things about themselves and each other as Minnie relives New Year’s Eve. Maybe you could argue that they’re all the wiser by the end, through some Einsteinian-humanistic equation. But each timeline is its own thing and ends abruptly, and there’s no indication of whether events in a given timeline continue beyond Minnie taking another swig of tequila, so you probably can’t draw any larger philosophical or cosmological inferences, except that Minnie starts to get incrementally closer to what she wants, then starts to understand why she shouldn’t want it.
I’ve seen many SXSW debuts that seem like they might have played better as short films (some started out that way). For all its virtues, including game performances and a catchy period soundtrack, this is another. At the halfway mark you start to feel like all the cards in the movie’s deck have been played. “One More Shot” (a title with a creakily obvious double meaning) grapples with its own version of a problem that afflicted one of the time travel movies at SXSW 2024, “The Greatest Hits,” a romantic comedy-drama about grief in which hearing a particular song triggers the heroine’s plunge into the past and brings her dead boyfriend and their relationship back. I can apply a bit of that review to this movie: “[it] quickly becomes repetitious, and there isn’t enough real-world messy specificity to make the repetitiousness the point, and the reward, of watching.”
Writer-director Tyler Cornack’s “Mermaid” is a hybrid of a horror film, a twisted and doomed romance, a satire on American spiritual emptiness, and a tale of a schmuck who has failed in life but believes that caring for someone (or something) might redeem him. The schmuck in question, Doug Nelson (Johnny Pemberton), lives alone in his late father’s house, depends on alcohol and pills, and has a miserable job cleaning the dumpster-sized tropical fish tank at a strip club. When the boss tells him they’re getting rid of the fishtank and fires him, Doug seems as if he’s lost even the most perfunctory sense of purpose. He already had to give up custody of his daughter—the byproduct of the only time he ever had sex—and owes money to his dad’s menacing friend Ron (Robert Patrick). What’s the point of going on? Why not jump in the ocean?
He finds a mermaid. This isn’t the typical mermaid from a children’s book or the Fourth of July Mermaid Parade in Coney Island. She looks like the tail-finned aquatic cousin of a giant vampire bat, with razor-sharp teeth, milky eyes, and a corpse’s bluish-grey skin. But Doug still takes her home, nurses her back to health in his bathtub, drugs her to keep her from tearing his face off or skittering back to the ocean, names her Destiny, and starts thinking of her as his girlfriend. Destiny projectile-vomits black goo after eating. Of course, Doug dresses her in his mom’s old clothing, props her up in a wheelchair and brings her to his daughter’s birthday party. Imagine “Splash” combined with “Weekend at Bernie’s” and then add projectile vomiting and gory fish-eating.
“Mermaid” is at its best when Doug and Destiny are alone in that oppressively quiet house and we get to observe Doug’s desperate desire for a twisted facsimile of connection. Destiny can’t speak because she’s a fish lady, and even if she could, she’s drugged up and marooned on land, so it’s hard to say whether there’s a real connection to be had, and that’s not the point of the movie. But it’s hard to say what the point is; “Mermaid” starts out an edgy, unnerving, borderline repugnant loser comedy that will do anything to get a reaction from us. It has a strong midsection that says a lot about modern loneliness and male delusion. Then it pivots to a crackpot’s fantasy of saving his true love from bad guys (much like other popular films about extraordinary aquatic creatures held hostage by people who view them only as assets, including “The Shape of Water,” “Splash,” and “Free Willy”). It feels a bit padded, and its shagginess means that Pemberton’s mesmerizing, slack-jawed man-child performance loses impact as the story goes on.
But Cormack has a rapport with actors and a knack for finding beauty in decayed Florida textures, and he’s helped by Joel Lavold’s luminous images as well as on-point work by other key department heads (including production designer Allie Leone, set decorator Alyssa Franks, and costume designer Sara Lukaszewski). In the end, “Mermaids” is more a promising first effort than a fully satisfying experience. But the fact that you need multiple genre labels to even begin to describe it confirms that it’s made by artists who don’t care about stuff like that, and we need as many of those as we can get.
“Sweetness” is a Gen Z answer to “Misery.” But instead of a prudish but ultimately terrifying middle-aged woman kidnapping her favorite writer and imprisoning him in a cabin in snowy mountains, the main characters are a suburban high school girl named Rylee (Kate Hallet) and her favorite pop star Payton (Herman Tømmeraas), whose music Rylee credits with emotionally rescuing her after her mother died.
The first part of the movie details Rylee’s world and her fragile emotional state. Her dad Ron (Justin Chatwin), a cop, is sleepwalking through life and seems more invested in his relationship with his new girlfriend than with his duties as a father. Rylee is bullied and ignored at school and feels like nobody loves or understands her except for her best friend Sidney (Ara Furukawa). A series of coincidences (so unlikely that even the two girls have to marvel at it) brings Payton into their orbit. After a drugged-out Payton nearly crashes his car while driving Rylee home from a concert, Rylee takes him into her house (her pop is temporarily away) and tries to take care of him and (she hopes) detox him.
The plot is strangely similar to that of “Mermaid,” which otherwise has nothing in common with “Sweetness,” and there are affinities with Craig Brewer’s “Black Snake Moan,” another “I am holding you hostage for your own good” thriller. There’s a long stretch where you start to wonder if “Sweetness” is actually going to insist with a straight face that Rylee really is Payton’s unlikely angel of redemption even though she has to chain him in a basement to accomplish her goals.
The polite way to describe the screenplay is to say it doesn’t make a lick of sense. A lot of wild, loud, at times extremely violent action occurs in broad daylight and the middle of the night in a suburban community, and yet no one but the main characters notice. The movie can’t seem to make up its mind if Kylee is deranged by grief and other issues or if she truly is God’s blunt instrument. The final stretch contains some cold-blooded horror movie violence, and given how Kylee has been presented up to that point, you might have a hard time believing it. The movie gets sillier and more panicked as it goes, and there are sequences where it seems like it’s contriving excuses to keep going.
But it’s worth watching for the assured direction (lots of Robert Altman-style long takes with 1970s-style zooms) and the central performance by Hallet. Her work here doesn’t merely hold a patchy movie together, it’s so eerily assured that at times it truly does seem as if the character is channeling a higher power. Remember her name. You’ll be seeing it a lot.
