Dean O’Flaherty’s Beautiful demonstrates boldness on the director’s part, to spin a pshychological drama out of the ordinariness of suburbia. It’s clear O’Flaherty loves movies and he throws in references to everything from Blue Velvet to American Beauty, with occasional nods to Lolita and even Rear Window.
The film shows early promise: in a nondescript Australian neighbourhood (with its typical mix of McMansions and red brick houses) a variety of urban myths abound, concerning a recent spate of abductions.
Daniel (Sebastian Gregory) is an awkward teenager with a knack for amateur photography, who lives with his overbearing father (Aaron Jeffrey) and sympathetic step-mum (Peta Wilson). Danny has issues, not least the fact he knows nothing about his mother (whose image has been ripped, inexplicably, from the family album), and he is a bully-magnet at school.
His affection for the neighbourhood sexpot, Suzy (Tahyna Tozzi) is thinly disguised, and she feeds his crush whilst satisfying her own curiosity about the neighbourhood goings on. She enlists his help to solve the mystery of the missing girls, starting with the inhabitants of the 'creepy house’ at the end of the street – an ageing California bungalow of the type described as a 'fixer-upper’ in DIY show-speak. At the window of the mysterious No. 46, a woman in white peers out the lace curtains, every day, waiting for an angry man in a hotted up Ford.
Is there some connection between these oddballs and the missing teens? Saucy Suzy is convinced of it and she sets Danny on a mission to join the dots, in an increasingly dangerous series of dares, on the promise of a kiss.
All of this is established in the first third of the film, but after setting up an intriguing premise about the seamy underbelly of suburbia, Beautiful loses momentum mid-way. The plot relies too heavily on coincidence to propel it forward and despite a big action sequence and increasing body count, the film ends with a whimper and a silly twist tacked onto the end, which raises more questions than it answers (and not in a clever, intriguing, leave-a-few-threads-unresolved-to-keep-you-wanting-more kind of way).
To his credit, O’Flaherty has attracted a solid cast of performers to the project: Deborah Lee Furness and Erik Thomson as Suzy’s fussy parents; Asher Keddie as the damsel in distress at no. 46; and the afore-mentioned Wilson, who stands out with the most natural and empathetic performance of the bunch, as one of the film’s two women trapped in bad relationships with partners they don’t understand. Relative newcomers Gregory and Tozzi do the best with the material they’re given, and Tozzi in particular, injects the most life into her character, as the sideways glancing femme fatale of the piece. A weak note is Aaron Jeffrey as Wilson’s alpha male partner / Danny’s father, in an offbeat, unnatural performance that is largely hampered by lines of dialogue that probably read a lot better on the page than they sound on the screen.
Beautiful is backed by Adelaide-based Kojo Pictures, a company with a successful post production arm, so it figures that the film boasts very good production values. The strong visuals belie the small budget, and it boasts a strong soundtrack, well mixed.
But none of this is enough to cover up the weak plot. It pains me to say it but Beautiful seems destined to be yet another disappointing footnote in a submission for better script development in Australian filmmaking. It’s a good idea that’s been undercooked and overdone.
