Never Have I Ever
Near-alcoholic, misanthropic screenwriter Sam (Andrew Lee Potts) barely raises an eyebrow when a bottle of wine appears in his study the day after his keys and wallet go missing … then he sits down to work the next morning, ready to finish a draft which has to be sent to a producer by the end of the week, and discovers someone has got into his laptop and deleted all the files to do with the project. And without his cards, he can’t get coffee or – worse – booze from the bartender (Johnny Vivash) at his local watering hole. He’s saved from dryness of the throat by Mara (Beatrice Fletcher), a grief counsellor who seems to be taking pity on him though we’ve already glimpsed her screaming and wielding a bloody spade in a fragmentary prologue and also spotted her using his stolen password to access his computer … and a game of cat-and-mouse takes place, with carefully timed revelations that come out during a fractious round of the title party game.
Written and directed by Damon Rickard – with additional writing by Potts and Mitch Bain – this could work as a stage play since it’s essentially a two-character piece which depends on clever writing and playing. Mara has a lurking mentor (Matt McClure) and Sam a flashback wife (Amber Doig-Thorne) but the focus is on what’s happening over a three-day period leading up to a grim Christmas for some … with that fuming producer who hired a literal carcrash writer who evidently has never heard of back-ups possibly the least of the unhappy celebrants in this little knot of people. It’s the kind of film which progressively announces that it’s going to get darker, then has the main characters crack a little to show their possibly nastier depths.
Told from two viewpoints, with a second run at the story filling in some but not all gaps, it strings out its mysteries cleverly, so that not every twist is guessable even as it works its way towards a foregone conclusion. Potts and Fletcher have both put in some time in low-budget British horrors – Potts was in Lore last year, Fletcher is also in Cinderella’s Revenge (not to be confused with Cinderella’s Curse) – but get a real acting work-out here.
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