FrightFest review – Lost Solace

My notes on Lost Solace

This well-wrought, gloomy Canadian psycho-noir from writer-director Chris Scheuerman has several interesting ideas and some solid characterisation – but offers low-wattage thrills and has a measured pace which defuses what ought to be a much more suspenseful situation.  Well-groomed and plausible Spence (Andrew Jenkins), in incipient sociopath, takes a new form of ecstasy in a club and starts seeing the world differently (conveyed by subtle and creepy CGI swirls), experiencing emotions which were alien to him.  In this state,he falls in with rich girl Azaria (Melissa Roxburgh) and her dissolute brother Jory (Charlie Kerr) – they have a fractured, odd relationship which leads to the perceptive Jory asking Spence to murder his domineering father Chuck (Michael Kopsa).  It’s just Spence’s luck to be coming down from a lifetime of dissociative weirdness only to run into Jory and Chuck, who are cracked in their own ways.  He also falls under the care of Betty (Leah Gibson), who diagnoses what’s happened to him and wonders if the freak drug might be a useful treatment for other sufferers from antisocial disorder.  There’s a lot of plot going on, revolving around the curiously innocent psychopath – who is assailed by people who want to use him for various things, to secure a fortune, as a sex object, as a medical test case, as an example.  The story doesn’t develop in the obvious ways, but sometimes Scheurman gets a little too oblique for comfort.