Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films, 2020
Images from the Internet
Colourblind
Directed by Nathan Hill
NH Productions
79 minutes, 2020
Well, yes, this technically is not horror.
It’s more Dashiell Hammett than Stephen King, but this is definitely an indie,
low-budget film from Down Under (Melbourne, specifically). It is also a
promotion for the director, writer and star, Nathan Hill. I first became aware
of Hill from a role he played named Brad Plunderpants in a hilarious sci-fi
horror flick called SheBorg (reviewed elsewhere on this blog).
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| Nathan Hill |
The centerpiece to this tale is a Private
Investigator (PI) named Jaffy Rotunda (Hill). He has been retired from the biz
(though I don’t know what he’s been doing to pay the rent) and gets called back
by his old boss to help a femme fatale named Trix Baxter (Celeste Wilson) to
find out what’s going on with her sister, Sia (Anne Gauthier). Mental illness
apparently runs in this extremely wealthy family, so she is worried about her
(or her inheritance, it is not clear).
Meanwhile, at the same time, Sia’s mom (Jane
Badler, who many might remember as the evil, rodent-eating lizard queen from
the television mini-series V and its sequels in the 1980s) has hired
another PI named Mr. X (Nicholas Wightman) to do the same, without knowing what
Trix has done. Both PIs are in competition to find out just what little Sia is
up to these days. Mr. Baxter says it best when he states that no female member
of his family is nice. Well, that could go well in a mirror, as well.
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| Anne Gauthier |
But of course, things do not go along smoothly
in the hard-bitten world of PI life, as Jaffy has taken a liking to Sia as he
is following her around. He’s suffering from the titular colo(u)r-blindness in
which he sees everything in black and white, but he is able to view Sia in
living rainbow.
The first rule of Fight Clu… I mean of being a
PI is you do not get involved with your clients. It did not work for Sam Spade
and Philip Marlowe (who kinda look alike, don’t you think?), and it is not
gonna be productive for Jaffy.
Jaffy’s character is kind of mild, like warm
milk on a cold night. He certainly doesn’t come across as frosty as Mr. X, and
seems to be lonely, despite having a decent friend. He tries to reach out to
Sia and Mr. X, but is rebuffed by the Xer, and Sia turns her back on him at
some point in the story as well (I will not divulge details).
What I found more interesting is the relationship
between Jaffy and Mr. X, and the misinterpretation of Sia’s Family of who hired
whom. Jaffy and X-ey have a history that is not too pleasant, and one of them
certainly does not have any interest in playing nice.
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| Jane Badler |
While the story is somewhat compelling, though
drags its feet a bit, not much really happens. A beating here, and a few prostitutes
there, but the whole point of the action feels like it stalls in places, and
the whole point of the exercise is somewhat muddled. Maybe I missed it in the
accents? Hill is good in the role, and it leaves an opening for a sequel, but
his character seems a bit mushy. Mr. X comes across as harder and, well, fits
the PI trope. Jaffy is more like someone Elliott Gould might have played in the
1970s (though Gould did play Marlowe in 1973’s The Long Goodbye...).
This is a movie that could easily play to a
wide range of audience, with the exception of one scene at the end that
reminded me a bit of Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge (1971). This is
a mostly PG-level release, so grab your partner and dosey doe, cook up some popcorn,
put a log on the fire, and roll this one up.
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