Never Saw It Coming
(Canada, 83 min.)
Dir. Gail Harvey, Writ. Linwood Barclay
Starring: Emily Hampshire, Eric Roberts, Tamara Podemski,
Shaun Benson, Katie Boland, Nick Serino
 |
| Emily Hampshire and Eric Roberts star in Never Saw It Coming |
Keisha Ceylon is a small town charlatan. She moonlights as a
psychic, helping families of the small snowy town of Sorrow Bay find their
missing loved ones, but only after she gets their cash. Five grand nets a few
easily plucked clues and everyone generally leaves the transaction happy.
The other half holding Never
Saw It Coming together is Tamara Podemski, who plays the film’s lawfully crafty mind, Detective Rona Wedmore. She follows the clues to Keisha when her
case about a missing woman turns up an unexpected dead body. Had Keisha been a
legitimate psychic, she might have foreseen the violence that would ensue if
she offered her services to help said dead person contact his missing family
member. However, her eagerness to play the short con comes in handy when
Detective Redmore—does small town Canada even have homicide detectives?—shares far
too many details of the case and enlists Keisha to help explain a few things.
The story unfurls without much suspense or tension. A large
part of the problem is that the audience knows that Keisha is a cheat from the
beginning. Revealing that Keisha isn’t a psychic helps one appreciate the playfulness of Hampshire’s performance, but it drains the film's potential for
suspense and mystery, like when Keisha visits the Garfield family, played by
Eric Roberts and Katie Boland, to make a quick buck by exploiting their need
for hope. Roberts is astonishingly bad in his big scene with Hampshire and the
results are far more comedic than one expects as things spiral out of control
with ludicrous abandon.
Linwood Barclay adapts his own crime novel in a series of
conversations that are staged unconvincingly in director Gail Harvey’s
straightforward, somewhat televisual style. Some of the characters have no
logical purpose in the film, like a young hood played by Sleeping Giant’s Nick Serino who pops up when things need a neat
conclusion or a thin, mildly ambiguous explanation. (Why he exploits Keisha isn’t
clear.) Barclay provides little context or backstories for the characters,
which accentuates the sheer randomness of much of what happens. There might be
the makings of a film equivalent to a good beach read with Barclay’s book, but Never Saw It Coming just provides some dimly
lit exchanges. The lack of synergy between the performances makes for a bumpy
ride.
Hampshire’s storyline with Keisha’s inept boyfriend Kirk
(Shaun Benson, playing to the back row) adds Fargo-esque stupid criminal shenanigans to the self-serious
potboiler. Kirk’s goofiness is outsnarled only by Roberts, while Boland
fares better as Garfield’s emotionally conflicted daughter. She gets a plum
scene with Podemski that punctuates Keisha’s aforementioned violent encounter
with a prospective client, but neither scene delivers the dramatic impact that
it should. The film is a juggling act of genres and tones that leaves all the eggs splattered on the floor.
Everything in Never
Saw It Coming could simply be avoided by a mere explanation of facts as
self-defence. The film draws out Keisha’s mess with twists that
manage to entertain because everyone behaves so stupidly that one hopes there’s an
allegory of sorts lost within the snow. It’s never quite clear if Never Saw It Coming is supposed to be a
comedy, but Hampshire’s performance indicates that she at least is aware it’s
all a big joke. If only everyone’s agents could see the future.
Never Saw It Coming opens in Toronto on August 17.
