Jackie van Beek is a stage mom who takes things to an extreme in this Australian dark comedy, but Film Brain isn't going to side with horrid people either way.
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00:00Jackie Van Beek is living vicariously through her daughter, literally, in the dark Australian comedy Audrey.
00:07Van Beek plays Ronnie, a once promising actor, now a stage mom to her daughter Audrey,
00:12played by Josephine Blazier, trying to get her to have the success that she always wanted,
00:16whether Audrey wants it or not.
00:19When Audrey falls into a coma, Ronnie decides to take her daughter's place to keep her career going.
00:24The bonkers premise sounds like World's Greatest Dad by way of Strangers with Candy,
00:29but the film is about that less than you might think, which is a bit of a shame,
00:33because there's some promise to a monstrously delusional main character trying to relive her past glories.
00:39Maybe it shies away from that because the logistics of a 40-something mother convincingly passing as her teen daughter for weeks
00:45isn't very plausible even for a comedy.
00:48Instead, the whole family get their own subplots, which leaves to quite a disjointed feel.
00:53The younger daughter Nora, played by Hannah Deviney, has cerebral palsy and is so overlooked
00:58that the house isn't even adapted for her as she deals with the insensitive people around her.
01:03Elsewhere, Ronnie's frustrated husband Cormac, played by Jeremy Lindsay-Taylor,
01:06spins a lie of his own to impress his crush, a Christian grief counsellor who moonlights making Bible-themed adult movies,
01:13another amusing comic conceit the film then suddenly drops.
01:17Nearly all the characters are incredibly selfish and entitled people who paint themselves as victims
01:22when confronted and that they're so terrible can be amusing so long as the film knows they're off-putting
01:28and doesn't try to make them likeable.
01:30And that's the mistake that Audrey makes.
01:33The movie starts out as a raunchy, no-holds-barred comedy taking aim at the performative behaviour
01:38people do to impress others so that they can validate themselves.
01:42But around the time the family realise the pitch-black idea they're better off without Audrey,
01:48the movie starts trying to empathise with its characters despite them being as rotten as the dying lemon tree outside their home.
01:54The final third in particular takes a sinister dramatic turn as it starts evoking the Greek myth of Medea,
02:00a shift in tone that isn't helped by the fact the filmmakers apparently want us to be cheering on what happens,
02:06or at least according to the production notes.
02:08I think, given the circumstances, I'm not supporting anyone because they're all awful narcissists
02:14and it was funnier when that was their only crime.