Review: Stubbornly Here – Vanishing act
Directed by Taylor Broadley
Starring Nathan di Giovanni, Cleo Meinck, Jonathon Maddocks
7/10
Perth filmmaker Taylor Broadley brings his directorial debut, Stubbornly Here, to Revelation Film Festival this month, a touchingly earnest piece about both the transition from adolescence to adulthood and the different ways that humans grieve.
Part Pied Piper of Hamelin, part Left Behind, Stubbornly Here’s opening premise outlines that youth under eighteen are simply vanishing, winking out of existence. After a flurry of panic and concern at the start of the phenomenon, a year later, the adult population is getting on with their lives, the posters of the lost are torn and frayed on the walls, and the whole situation is just background noise from the media’s talking heads.
Into this, three teenage friends refuse to placidly await the worst, planning an escape route from their assumed fate, which is being too easily accepted by others. The three leads—Cleo Meinck as Sunny, Nathan di Giovanni as PJ, and Jonathan Maddocks as Floyd—share an easy chemistry, which adds a lived-in believability to their characters’ friendships.
Meinck especially brings a nervous yet infectious energy to her role, effervescent in happier scenes but just as convincing when Sunny is overwhelmed.
The script, also by Broadley, ably assists the on-screen relationships with naturalistic conversation and laconic wit in equal measure. There are several very philosophical discussions, ranging from anger through bargaining to acceptance, with a constant underlying anxiety and doubt, masked better by some characters than others.
Deftly directed with what appears to have been a light touch, Stubbornly Here also has several standout extended one-shot scenes, building tension, conflict, and eventual resolution in microcosm.
Stubbornly Here is very much a small-scale early career production, with a surplus of ideas and ambition to burn, particularly in the writing and the performances. Shot in black and white with a minimum of shooting locations and an everyday conversational tone, it combines the low-fi slacker realism of Kevin Smith’s Clerks with the claustrophobia and urgent existentialism of David Lynch.
Some very big concepts are brought to fruition by a first-time director in this film, and it will be fascinating to see where the cast and crew go from here.
PAUL MEEK