Director: Frieda Luk
The blurb for Sacred Creatures actually sounded great: beware the perils of magical thinking for, well, something bad is bound to happen if you believe that everything happens for a reason. The other promising factor was the film’s setting in the sun-drenched landscape of rural Italy, which felt perfect for a debut feature centered on the performance of non-mainstream American actress of half-Italian descent, Olivia Luccardi. And although the premise is somewhat familiar—a sister with emotional problems descends ever deeper into self-delusion, while her siblings try to keep her on this side of reality— you will be hooked from the first shots.
Where first-time feature director Frieda Luk decides to take the film thereafter is another matter. Instead of pacing this descent into the titular strangeness we were all anticipating, Luk offers a scene-by-scene — or, rather, detail-by-detail — account of a visit to Italy in the company of three siblings. Yet this particular Italy offers little besides the sun.
The problem is that the focus becomes too sharp. Everything in the script is stacked in the service of the main plot, with characters rewritten almost entirely to serve it and some of them remaining little more than plot devices. The adolescents surrounding Luccardi’s character, Miriam, are a case in point, while her family suddenly becomes obsessed with a single problem, as though their entire lives had been put on hold for the few weeks — or months; the script is rather loose on that — during which they remain in Italy. Not even an adequately written and satisfactorily acted gay relationship between Miriam’s handsome brother and his Italian sculptor boyfriend—which is a sincere attempt at a subplot—manages to make us remotely engage with the actually-not-so-strange happenings. It is not that the events depicted are not believable: they are so conspicuously ordered that we become tired of the plot within the first 20 minutes.
Nor does Miriam’s apotheosis-like cult worship in the second half make things any better. (You guessed it, she becomes so deluded as to believe in her otherwise charming naiveté that she is a sort of a spiritual guru, and helps seduce absolutely everyone, including the most cynical of the skeptics). The idea is interesting, if not exactly original. The execution leaves much to be desired.
This is because there is a lack of a sense of proportion. The director seems to believe that everything in the film is important and therefore has difficulty deciding what deserves to stay. With some scenes lasting for as little as a shot and as long as 15 minutes (as is the case with the party scene in the middle of the film), unimportant details are blown out of proportion while other potentially significant ones are left unexplained. Scenes that could easily have been dropped at the script stage — or at least on the editing table — somehow make it gloriously intact into the finished film. The result is a disjointed feature with little backbone to hold its many ideas together. The pacing is uneven, and the character development rarely has enough breathing room to make us genuinely interested.
If the above could be forgiven in a debut feature, the editing takes the cake. The film feels as though it was cut by someone barely out of film school, with pointless fades attempting to link scenes together, while an uninspired soundtrack randomly introduces pieces whose use is particularly odd when they sometimes last only a few seconds. Hip hip hooray for independent filmmaking, certainly, but a little more attention to the basic principles of continuity editing and soundtrack construction would have changed the overall face of the film.
Frieda Luk has good ideas, appropriately strange stories to tell, and a knack for the unusual. There is also an interesting directorial sensibility here that may well develop into something more distinctive with time. What Sacred Creatures seems to need is a slightly more experienced crew, and a little more time for the material to settle before being released. There is a strange, potentially compelling film somewhere inside this one; unfortunately, Sacred Creatures feels as though it has reached the screen before it has quite found it.
Sacred Creatures is screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival from 13-19 August.
