Movies I have a stake in

People with careers in the film industry, or even tangential to it, often find themselves in the position of awaiting the release of movies they had some involvement in. My wife is one such person, as she has approved funding for movies, script-edited movies, even produced one feature.

As a film critic, though, I rarely feel like I can claim direct involvement with an upcoming release, or even indirect involvement. I'm looking at things after they're completed, not before they're started.

There have been a few possible exceptions, and one of them I watched on Friday night.

The new Australian horror Relic -- available on IFC Midnight in the U.S., and debuting here on the streaming service Stan -- is directed by first-time feature director Natalie Erika James. She's been an upcoming talent we've been buzzing about for a couple years here in Australia.

As many debut horror movies are, Relic is a feature-length expansion of a short film James directed, called Creswick. Creswick is what made me bubble up with excitement about what James has to offer the film world.

I may not have talked about this on the site before, but ReelGood, the website I write for and now run, has a very successful annual film festival associated with it. I can call it "very successful" without sounding immodest because I have almost nothing to do with it. It was the brainchild of the site's creator, my former editor who handed me the reins to the site earlier this year. He'll return to writing at some point, but is done, at least for now, with both running the site and running the festival.

The festival runs on a Saturday in March each year, and it showcases the best in Australian short films. About 30 films play over the course of the day, a couple times a day, in packages of three or four per hour time slot. At first I wasn't sure what I thought about this format. Although I like any opportunity to see young filmmakers strut their stuff, I don't watch as many short films as I should, which is partly due to a fundamental lack of interest in short-form filmmaking. And besides, when I was new to the site and didn't know anybody, the festival left me sometimes half an hour or more between the end of one screening session and the start of the next -- way too long to shuffle about awkwardly and try to figure out who to talk to while we all congregated in the social spaces of the venue. Pretending to be lost in my phone helped.

Anyway, after a year or two I joined the panel of judges who voted on the festival winners, a position I held for, I think, two years. They didn't eject me from the position, it's just that they had a number of guys who were much more directly involved with the running of the festival who eventually assumed those responsibilities. (Though I do wonder if the fact that I gave top honors to a film no one else liked, in my last year on the panel, had anything to do with it.)

The first year, James' film Creswick was one of the films we considered for the top prize. It's a nine-minute horror short that looks gorgeous and is incredibly creepy. If you want to see how good it is, it's available on YouTube. Check it out here.

The film won top honors at the festival that year, thanks in part to my voting it #1. I wasn't the only one to cast a #1 vote, but without any one of us giving it our top honors, another film might have claimed those honors instead.

Winning the ReelGood Film Festival's top prize certainly was not the thing that vaulted Natalie Erika James into international prominence, brought her funding for Relic, and allowed it to play at this year's Sundance Film Festival. But I like to think it played some small, unquantifiable role.

So when I realized very belatedly, only about a week ago, that Relic was set to debut on Stan, a service to which we already subscribed, I got very excited. Sooner than I imagined, I'd get to see what the young filmmaker I'd championed could do at feature length. I was prepared to be blown away.

Oops.

I didn't like the movie! So sad.

It pains me to no end to write this, but it's true. I'm really glad I suggested that our horror critic review the movie instead of me, because now that I've seen it, I just couldn't bring myself to trash this movie after being so hopeful about it from the short. Besides, it feels especially cruel to have to take down homegrown talent on the site. (I don't worry about it so much here, as I don't have nearly as big of an audience.) We wouldn't compromise our impartiality for the sake of Australian filmmakers, and I never consciously boost my rating or evaluation of a movie based on such considerations. But let's just say it feels much more positive all around when we like the movies made by Australians and get to champion them.

Fortunately, that will be the case here. Our horror critic appears to have loved the movie. Although he has not submitted me his review yet, he did say it was "really great" and "quite a watch."

I'll be curious to see what he thought were its strengths, because to me, it was derivative, half-baked prestige horror without character development or a point. That one sentence is as cruel as I care to be, in the off chance that my "protege" (ha), Natalie, does in fact read this. However, I also realize that if you have not seen Creswick, you have different expectations coming in.

I will say that Relic, which seems like it's being well received in general (a whopping 91% on Rotten Tomatoes), does nothing to tarnish my optimism about James' career. This is still the person who utterly wowed me with Creswick.

I just think that maybe Creswick was not well suited to being expanded to feature length, though I should say that the characters are different, and it's not clear until later in the movie that it is definitely an expanded version of that film. The key to Creswick is its mood and a sense of mystery that is perfect at nine minutes. You need more at 90 minutes, and Relic just doesn't have it.

I suspect that making a longer version of your own short film can be constraining, even if we think it creates the ultimate opportunity to "write what you know." Suddenly you are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Better, maybe, if you just start fresh with a story that was always meant to be feature length.

Anyway, my stake in Natalie Erika James has, unfortunately, left me disappointed for the moment. But since it seems to be pleasing other people, James will get to make more movies, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

And if she blossoms into the visionary horror director I know she can be, I can still say -- if I want to delude myself just a little bit -- that I played some small role in it.