'Come as a Bright Day' Review

Simon Aboud’s directorial debut, Come as a Bright Day, is backed by an ambitious premise; in the space of a few hours, under the life-altering stress and strain of a hostage situation, the lives of a group of unrelated upper-class London socialites (and wannabe socialites) become forever changed and inter-linked with one another. An ambition, I may add, Come as a Bright Day doesn’t come close to fulfilling.

It’s incredibly frustrating viewing. With such a fantastic British cast, you’d be forgiven for having lofty expectations. For a film as character-driven as this, the single most important factor behind it reaching its potential is the quality of the writing, and yet the dialogue is hideously contrived and forced. It’s as if Aboud was flicking between his current script draft and a copy of ‘Screenplay Writing for Dummies.’ The line “Amen to that, brother” is uttered without a single whiff of irony. I sincerely hope that you, dear reader, are as terrifically outraged by this as I am. You can always tell the measure of a film by the general attitude shown towards it by the cast, and in this case it speaks volumes, Craig Roberts being the only one of the four leading stars to turn up for the film’s world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.

The characterisation is painfully one-dimensional; Aboud has about the same appreciation for character development as Samantha Brick has for modesty; the butterfly jewel which acts as the film’s McGuffin is its most developed aspect, and that’s, you know, an inanimate object. Roberts’ Sam is a snide, detestable slug whose sole ambition is to slime his way up the ladder of society, and assumedly will get off at the ‘politics’ rung, considering his lack of human decency and profound self-obsession. Timothy Spall, as the friendly, wisdom-spouting father figure, is infuriatingly, and stupidly, calm and resolute in a situation of real menace, and as for Kevin McKidd’s robber? I’m not sure he’s even human. Numerous romantic questions for McKidd are poised, and moral dilemmas hypothesised, but none are ever developed or concluded. I’m sure Aboud’s intentions were positive; that he should be a complicated individual; that his past determines his morally dubious actions, and that therefore, he should be just as empathised with as feared. But there’s a thin line between being a complex character, and a nonsensical one. McKidd has crossed that line twice now after deciding to return to his original side, because it’s what a nonsensical person would do after all.

Aboud is essentially flipping off such backwards things in today’s film industry, such as structure, believability and development of theme.

Yes, that is a tiny statuette of the Virgin Mary on his mask. Nonsensical, you see. 

Sometimes even the poorest writing cannot prevent some genuine chemistry being created between romantic leads, and Come as a Bright Day could potentially succeed in this regard, if it wasn’t so blatantly obvious that Roberts and Poots utterly despise each other. Sheer contempt pours out of every orifice. This hatred-rivalry would be funny, if it wasn’t so central to the significance of the bloody film.

The film is the opposite of a rough diamond; it’s a slightly polished brick fallen off of a 60’s Glasgow high rise. It does have some positive elements. Imogen Poots is not just One Of The Best Looking Women In The World, as Mary she also performs amicably with material with which the accompanying term of ‘limited’ would be laughed off as the funniest joke ever told. She has genuine likeability, and there is a surprisingly touching scene where Spall describes how he inherited the butterfly jewel, and how he treasures its beauty and magnificence each day. He is, of course, referring to Mary. It’s very moving, and an immense pity that the film built around this moment is so utterly disappointing. Mary wishes to travel the world, and her desire to leave the world of these unsympathetic, hollow, materialism-addicted shells almost matches my own.

She's like Scarlett Johansson without the difficult-to-spell name

Aboud clearly wished to satirise the superficiality of the lifestyle of this latest generation of the ‘Bright Young Things,’ but his film is depressingly shallow, and therefore an inherently unrewarding experience. When considering the corruption of humanity by commercialism and capitalism, it is not in the least bit comprehensive, at least not beyond the main character’s own disillusionment with the upper-classes’ lifestyle. Its political references, the two thieves adorn the names ‘Cameron’ and ‘Clegg,’ are nothing more than yet another saddening wink to what could have been. This film will just leave you bitterly waiting for Kevin McKidd to just shoot the lot of them, before walking away, mooing, without stealing any jewels. Because, of course, that wouldn’t make sense.