Have you ever seen a movie that left no impression on you at all? Something not good enough to enjoy but not bad enough to bother complaining about? Director Ellie Kanner’s Wake is one of those movies that you’ll quickly forget about and never mention again. There is nothing interesting or memorable about this film at all.
The first scene starts out rather promising, with our leading lady Carys (Bijou Phillips) laid out on a slab at a funeral home, while the mortician makes up her face. She’s not dead. She just likes to lie there while her infatuated friend Shane (Danny Masterson) touches her up with his undertaking skills. She asks him about upcoming wakes and funerals because she likes to attend them.
At this point, you may be thinking that you’re in for an enjoyably morbid comedy about someone obsessed with death, such as in the excellent Harold and Maude. But you’d be wrong. Our protagonist is merely trying to cry. Ever since the death of her sister, she hasn’t been able to cry about anything so she goes to funerals, hoping that being around grieving people will rub off on her. It's not death she’s fixated on. She wants to be more normal, despite the fact that she seems perfectly normal to most eyes. Only her sarcastic and fashion-conscious roommate Lila (Marguerite Moreau) has noticed that Carys is depressed because she wears dark colors all the time. Even her mother (Jane Seymour, best known as Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman) chalks up Carys’s eccentricities as an understandable reaction to her sister’s death.
Carys finally starts to cry at a funeral when she hears handsome Tyler (Ian Somerhalder, best known as the ill-fated Boone on Lost) speak about his late fiancée Anne. Not that Tyler’s speech is particularly moving. Actually, it’s rather clichéd and uninspired, but for some reason it hits Carys where she lives and she starts crying. Maybe all she needed was to see a handsome guy in mild mourning.
In an I Love Lucy moment of contrived stupidity, Carys somehow ends up with the corpse’s valuable engagement ring in her hand and is too embarrassed to admit she accidentally took it off the dead girl’s finger so she hides it in her pocket and steals it.
Tyler and Carys start flirting at his fiancée’s funeral, which is meant to be a cinematic Meet-Cute but it just seems a bit creepy under the circumstances. She even goes as Tyler’s date to visit the deceased Anne’s parents, which is incredibly stupid. Carys pretends she knew Anne but her story is full of holes. Even when Tyler discovers the late Anne’s ring is missing, he angrily blames the funeral home and Carys doesn’t confess, despite the fact it gets her friend Shane in trouble.
It seems early on in the film that this will be a romantic comedy but then it switches gears abruptly and becomes a mystery. The late Anne’s family thinks he killed her. And the fact that he’s hooked up with a new girl so soon after Anne died seems to bear out the fact that he may never have loved Anne. The police seem to think so and Carys finds herself suspected of being an accomplice in the murder of a girl she never met.
Wake seems to suffer from an identity crisis. Director Ellie Kanner doesn’t know what kind of movie she wants to make. A romantic comedy? A murder mystery? A thriller? The script by Lennox Wiseley meanders along, never finding its center.
The thriller aspect of the movie isn’t very thrilling and the mystery isn’t very engrossing. The love story is tepid and the humor is mild at best. None of the aspects of this movie are particularly memorable. There’s nothing terribly wrong here but there’s nothing really right either.
DVD Bonus Features
The DVD features audio commentary by director Elle Kanner, writer/producer Lenox Wisely and producers Hal Schwartz and Bill Shraga. There is also a behind-the-scenes featurette, where the cast and crew discuss the film. Like the movie itself, the interviews are tediously uninteresting.
"Wake" is on sale April 20, 2010 and is not rated. Mystery. Written by Lennox Wiseley. Starring Bijou Phillips, Ian Somerhalder, Jane Seymour.
