?That was excruciating,? exhaled director Kieran Darcy-Smith as the lights came up on the Sundance opening night premiere of his first feature, the Australian dramatic thriller Wish You Were Here. The theater buzzed with appreciation, sure enough, and the film?s emotional blows strike as sharply thanks to strong performances by Joel Edgerton and Felicity Price. But movies like these almost always prompt that irksome question: Are we all at risk of suffering a case of the film festival goggles?
Wish You Were Here follows two Aussie couples (Edgerton and Price, Antony Starr and Teresa Palmer) who go on holiday in Southeast Asia only to see one of their party go missing, with ramifications that ripple out like shockwaves when they return home with fried nerves and secrets galore. Shot beautifully in Australia and Cambodia, it?s a slow-burn character drama that begins as a missing persons tale before switching gears to domestic drama/paranoia thriller in its rapidly escalating last act, doling out bits of information about what really happened on that last drug-fueled night.
It?s easy to see why Wish You Were Here was chosen to open the festival; just two years ago the Aussie import Animal Kingdom premiered at Sundance, leading the charge for a new wave of Australian cinema. Wish You Were Here unites Animal Kingdom actors Darcy-Smith and Edgerton, whose star has risen considerably in the past few years, under the Blue-Tongue Films banner they founded with Edgerton?s brother Nash. But while there?s a lot to like in Here, it doesn?t live up to David Mich�d?s explosive 2010 feature debut.
The film flashes between moments in time: Married couple David and Alice (Edgerton and Price) and Alice?s sister Steph (Palmer) struggle to adjust to normal life but are plagued by…
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