The prodigal son returns in this quietly-told drama from director Dominic Savage and star Elliot Page. As with Savage’s TV series, I Am, director and star conceived the story and then the cast largely improvised the dialogue that drives it along. Sometimes that results in meandering or overblown moments, but the general thrust is powerful enough to carry it along.
Page plays Sam, a trans man living in Toronto who returns to his family home for a visit for the first time in four years. He makes the journey with considerable trepidation: while his family are outwardly supportive of his transition, he fears that their feelings are considerably more complicated (and time will prove him right on that). Worse, the return opens up his own memories of unhappiness and alienation, even when he reconnects with his first love Katherine (Hillary Baack): she is now married with children, and wary of allowing the surviving spark between them to grow.
Savage and Page explore some of the complexities of transition through the family members. Sam isn’t a saint – he can be surly and defensive even before he has good cause to lash out. Equally, some of the family show open hostility to his identity and disrespect to his life. There is an enormous love for him, but hesitance too, a wariness that makes him visibly uncomfortable. His time with Katherine is more encouraging: while Sam repeatedly says he’s not looking for a relationship, his almost magnetic attraction to her suggests otherwise.
Sometimes you wish for a little more shape to the baggier scenes
Savage directs with a light hand, and sometimes you wish for a little more shape to the baggier scenes. In a few moments, the tension pinballs from high to low and back again without much purpose. The improvised dialogue isn’t generally bad – there’s obviously a naturalism to it and authenticity in the overlapping voices and conflicting priorities – but again, for a film with such a clear message you wish that the scenes had been a little more carefully crafted. Only Page, who has lived and written a book on his own experience of transition, communicates a fully developed, fully formed point of view, rather than vaguely well-meaning clumsiness.
Set under grey skies and shot in desaturated colours that seem to reflect Sam’s ambivalence about his visit, this is not a cheery film. But there’s hope here, and a reminder that found families can go a long way to make up for the shortcomings of kin – and that blood relations may still have love to give, however imperfectly they offer it.
In US theaters Fri Aug 23 and UK cinemas Aug 30.