EIFF 2015: Brand New-U
In the age of Charlie Brooker’s excoriating, insightful Black Mirror series and Dennis Kelly’s sinisterly gleaming Utopia, writer-director Simon Pummell has tried to tap into an underlying cultural malaise with this well planned – but soggily-executed – dystopian thriller-romance. Corporations, identity theft and guns: oh my!
The central relationship between Lachlan Nieboer’s chiselled, moody Slater and Nora-Jane Noone’s multifarious (but underutilised) Nadia is quickly sketched, and no sooner are we introduced than their lives are tipped upside down. Slater is coerced into working with the shadowy Brand New-U company, and stuff gets weird.
The fault here isn’t that Brand New-U leans too heavily on its filmic touchpoints (Vanilla Sky’s Life Extension service; The 6th Day and The Island’s shiny megacorps and blurred sense of self). Instead, the premise begs a tighter interplay between Slater’s boys-don’t-cry romantic motivations and the threat at hand, but the two threads fail to reconcile and the film becomes bloated and fogged as a result. It’s a slick production, make no mistake, but it lacks the athleticism its concepts require.
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Brand New-U had its world premiere at EIFF 2015:
20 Jun, 8.55pm, Odeon
27 Jun, 3.50pm, Odeon