FAILURE! *** USA / Mexico 2023 Dir: Alex Kahuam. 87 mins
Long-time (and long-suffering) supporting player Ted Raimi is the best thing about writer-director Kahuam’s admirable but ultimately underwhelming one-take thriller. He’s terrific as a heavily indebted businessman under immense pressure – the story unfolding in real time at his luxury but crumbling abode as life and work fall apart all around.
James (Raimi) is about to sell his late father’s struggling plastics factory. He’s behind on bank payments, pressured by his ex-wife about their daughter’s upcoming, very expensive wedding and threatened / troubled by various other parties – including disgruntled, violent worker Michael (John Paul Medrano) and unstable business partner Alvar (Daniel Kuhlman).
Unravelling against the fallout from the worldwide financial crisis and rather nicely punctuated by Raimi’s interactions with a pervasive apparent ghost (a droll Noel Douglas Orput), this compels thanks to his portrait of the stubborn, anxious, whiskey-quaffing “hero”, whose life-threatening encounters are neatly balanced by blander but no less stressful everyday family stuff. He’s alternatively weaselly and all too human – and we root for him while Raimi plays it for maximum squirm. Sadly, the twists, turns and dark humour, never quite pan out into a satisfying whole and, though a fine technical exercise, it falls some way short of the bullseye as either drama or intense black comedy.
Review by Steven West