Mark Reviews Movies: RADIOFLASH

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 14, 2019

Co-writer/director Ben McPherson's debut feature Radioflash puts forth a familiar premise and ultimately dismisses everything for a third act that feels isolated from everything that came before it. What begins as a journey through a world potentially devastated by disaster becomes the story of a teenage girl fighting for her freedom and life against a backwoods family.

Honestly, we probably should see this shift coming from the movie's beginning, which has Reese (Brighton Sharbino), an aspiring video game developer, solving an elaborate puzzle in a virtual-reality game. The initial setup, which turns out to just be a stylish but unrelated hook for this story, establishes Reese as a clever young woman, indeed, capable of figuring out difficult problems on the fly and without any help.

One suspects that McPherson and co-writer Matt Redhawk are also setting up the notion that everything that follows, which sees Reese confronted with assorted problems on her quest to safety, is just another game. Thankfully, the filmmaker avoids settling for such an obvious twist.

Instead, though, he kind of betrays the only purpose of that first sequence, by having Reese become a mostly passive agent in her own story. The setup is that an electromagnetic pulse has put an end to electricity on the West Coast. Reese and her widower father Chris (Dominic Monaghan) have to make their way to the girl's maternal grandfather Frank (Will Patton), who has prepared for such an event.

Along the way, the two encounter obstacle after obstacle. Later, Reese confronts obstacle after obstacle solo. People have become desperate. Some have turned violent for survival. Others offer help and are rewarded with a violent end for their troubles. It's the usual thing we expect from such a narrative.

Reese is just along for the ride, getting help from a father who drives her toward Frank, from a helpful farmer (played by Miles Anderson) who also becomes a chauffeur, and spends the last section of the story in the clutches of a family, led by matriarch Maw (Fionnula Flanagan), who apparently wants the girl for breeding purposes. She receives help there, too, and the climax is an extended chase through the woods.

What's familiar but at least intriguing, then, transforms into something wholly routine and that feels disconnected from the preceding story. Radioflash is less a cohesive story than it is a series of ideas cobbled together.

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