First Draft of Review

Faces were pulled when production group JAI announced they were releasing a film with them theme of social realism. Ken Loach successfully produced ‘Catchy Come Home’ with a similar aspect of homelessness but will JAI be able to compare. Playing on audience’s heart strings, JAI has craftily set their film in Brighton where a strategy is set out to target homelessness making sure no one will be homeless by 2020 but there is currently over 700 people sleeping rough. Will JAI’s audiences be able to handle the truth of homelessness, which is right on their doorstep?

Louise Martin Gaff takes on a role, which pushes all of her acting qualities and after her role in Cabaret, big things are expected from her which she succeeds to do so in ‘The Magazine’ by managing to represent all 3 different genres of class in one film. It’s not only her kindness to strangers or how she is oblivious to her surroundings it’s her ability to transform herself into 3 different people. The 3 different personalities don’t quite match DiCaprio’s feature in Shutter Island but creates the sensitive person every audience member will fall in love with but it sadly foreshadows her downfall, which makes it even more tragic.

The film doesn’t start off so promising. The long cuts and sloppy acting does not begin to set the audience up for anything special but as the film moves along, the decrescendo builds up it gets better.  Combining the genre of thriller and social realism always creates an interesting film so the use of kidnapping and guns to being homeless really captivates the diverse world we live in and despite it being tricky to combine the two, the aspect of flash backs really make it work. It contrasts Jason Eisener’s work by toning down the violence but creates the atmosphere even more chilling due to using a younger actor which sets the message of social realism that it can happen to anybody.

JAI’s muse of plot twists confuses, captivates and controls the audience’s minds by making the whole film become either an illusion or a dream. Throughout the whole film the dramatic ending is unexpected due to it’s mediocre pace and it’s worry for the ending to be too predictable but they managed to turn around all expectations and save the film.

Overall JAI delivers a good film, their plot fulfils the purpose of shocking and making the audience aware of homelessness but there are other ways of doing that, maybe a poster.