Falling Sons

“Jordan” (Dan Bennett) and estranged brother “Malcolm” (auteur Tyler Cole) are reunited following the recent death of their father. He is a man of religious faith, his sibling has none and so their respective approaches to their past lives, their relationship and their futures can be quite conflicted as they spend a few days trying to get past the fact that they really just don’t like one another. I suppose my biggest problem with this extremely dialogue-heavy enterprise is it’s length. Perhaps a more intensely focussed short feature might have worked better, but at just shy of two hours this is often extremely repetitive. “Malcolm” is a smart-mouthed guy with a penchant for the drink, and to be fair to Cole he actually plays that role in a fashion that initially gets under your finger nails. Bennett has a more restrictive role to play and to be honest is much less impressive but I felt that both roles ran out of steam after half an hour as their own relationships are scrutinised. Those, as we might have expected, turn out to be not without their own melodramtic and really quite contrived flaws and demons too - though comparatively uninteresting and certainly more predicable ones. Cole clearly has a lot to say here, and some of the theories that challenge religiosity positively or negatively showed promise, but this is definitely a feature where less would have been more and as the scenarios went from provocation to argument to provocation to more argument and even a fir cone fight, I felt this labour of love was just too, well, laboured.