It’s a dark thought that everyone’s had at one time or another – ‘what if I really am a burden on those around me? what if it really would be better if I wasn’t around anymore?’ It takes a bold film to take a look at a teenager asking that question about themselves and answer it with a resounding ‘yes, you don’t belong’, and an even bolder one to give that answer and be a comedy. Yet that’s exactly the kind of dark, funny confidence that Australian debut feature filmmaker Natalie Bailey and her writer (also making a feature debut) Lou Sanz have with Audrey, a very cruel and often very funny comedy about a girl who falls into a coma and how this calamity, in essence, ‘fixes’ her dysfunctional family.
This girl is the Audrey of the title (played by Josephine Blazier), a miserable and spiteful 17 year old who falls off the roof, hits her head, and falls deep into a coma. Audrey is not, though, the star of this show – instead that honour falls to her mum Ronnie (Jackie van Beek), a former soap actress who now lives vicariously through Audrey by having her attend a litany of drama classes that Audrey doesn’t have much actual interest in.
It’s in setting up this profoundly toxic family dynamic, completed by Ronnie’s meek, closeted husband Cormack (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) and Audrey’s envious younger sister with cerebral palsy Norah (Hannah Diviney), that Audrey is perhaps at its weakest. As we first meet everyone, with Ronnie more concerned with the acting opportunities that her comatose daughter is missing than her actual health status, they all come across as complete psychopaths, characters who can raise a chuckle but you want to get away from as soon as possible.
Time goes on, though, and Audrey’s absence enables Ronnie to restart her own acting career, Cormack to embrace his sexuality with hunky prayer group leader Bourke (Aaron Fa’aoso), and Norah to finally be really seen at school by her peers. Seeing this dysfunctional family turn into a functional one adds layers of genuine emotional complexity which, in turns, allows the laughs to flow much more freely. This middle act of Audrey is just packed with gags with a pretty damn high hit rate (a subplot in which Cormack gets a job as a boom operator for a Christian porn production company is gold), and in an era where a lot of comedy films simply forget about the basic idea of putting a bunch of jokes in, it’s great to see.
A turn back to the dramatic for the final act is a disappointment though, dragging Audrey into trippy, psychological thriller territory in a way that slows everything way down, stripping away laughs and offering little in terms of replacement. Opening and closing more weakly than it really should, given the quality on offer elsewhere, Audrey is a pretty great dark comedy sandwiched within a much less engaging dark drama, but the stuff here that works is hilarious, and surely a sign of very great things to come from Bailey and Sanz.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 