Director: Shawn Christensen
Year Released: 2014
Rating: 1.0
A suicidal addict (Christensen) cannot kill himself in his bathtub because his phone keeps ringing - it's his long-lost sister (Emmy Rossum), who is in prison and needs him to take care of her gifted but sheltered daughter (Fatima Ptacek). The night Christensen and Ptacek spend together is supposed to change both of them - he's supposed to teach her how to be more carefree, she's supposed to teach him responsibility and that 'life is worth living' - but the end result is never convincing: for the duration it's Christensen pulling ideas from other, better films (Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66 comes to mind) and wallowing in the dark world of addiction and dealers instead of him learning the fundamentals of how people interact with each other on a realistic level. Self-indulgence is acceptable if and when it produces artistic beauty or attains a level of poetry (hello Cassavetes), but stylized shots of New York City at night and slo-mo camera tricks and silly dream-sequences/delusions (Death appears at one point) are merely surface-level distractions.
