The Party’s Just Beginning

In filmmaker Karen Gillan’s very Scottish directorial debut, she plays Liusaidh ("Lucy"), a party girl who drinks, smokes, and sleeps with men she’s known for a matter of minutes. The aimless 24-year-old lives with her oblivious parents and works in the cheese section of a grocery store. For fun, she likes to get high with her friend, Alistair (Matthew Beard), an openly gay man with a closeted boyfriend, and watch reality competition shows. In her more introspective moments, Liusaidh stares out her bedroom window at neighbors whose lives seem happier. Suicidal individuals tend to gravitate towards her, including an elderly man who mistakenly dials her number instead of a suicide hotline. As moody techno music swirls around her, she’s also haunted by visions of a man leaning over a bridge she visits late at night (the site is infamous in Inverness because if the fall doesn’t kill the jumper, the train below will finish the job). After glancing in her direction, the man jumps to his death, a mystery that will be explained in due course. Things start to look up when Liusaidh meets Dale (a bearded Lee Pace), a divorced dad, but he leaves town after a few days—seemingly for good—and Alistair’s precarious personal life enters crisis mode. Although it starts out as a dark comedy, the film drops the humor once sexual assault and substance abuse enter the picture. It’s all a bit more than this randy character piece can handle, but Gillan holds promise as a director, and she manages to render Liusaidh sympathetic even as the latter makes one serious mistake after another. A strong optional purchase. (K. Fennessy)