Elsewhere (2009)
2/10
Boring mystery thriller.
5 February 2010
Warning: Spoilers
Elsewhere is set in a small US town where best friends Sarah (Anna Kendrick) & Jillian (Tania Raymonde) work in a small town café together, however Jillian has far greater ambitions & has set herself up an on-line internet account where she poses for naughty photo's & gets to turn anonymous men on all over the world. Jillain's ex boyfriend Chris (Joshua Swanson is having a part & while Sarah wants to go Jillain says she has other plans & hints at meeting one of her on-line admirers cryptically called MrX, that night at the party Sarah sees Jillain arguing with Chris but thinks little of it until she gets a call from Jillain the next day asking for help. No-one seems to have seen Jillian since the night of the party & Sarah becomes convinced something bad has happened to her best friend & sets out to play detective & find out what has happened but at the risk of her own life...

Written & directed by Nathan Hope I must admit right away that I though Elsewhere was as boring & rubbish a mystery thriller as I could have been unfortunate enough to have to sit through, seriously this is really bland & dull going for all of it's overlong 105 odd minute duration. For a start it's painfully slow, even having watched it all it felt like nothing barely happened, the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Jillian didn't do anything for me as she was fairly unlikable to start with & the the two-bit nothing excuse of a lame ending just makes you feel made at having wasted so much time on this. Basically it is never revealed what happened to Jillain, sure it makes clear that she is dead but the where & how are strangely absent with some rubbish about a guy killing her because she wanted to make him do bad things, yeah that's the entire plot & the script never goes into it any deeper than that. Is that dumb revelation really worth investing so much time in? No, it isn't & as someone who did invest the time I am fully qualified to say. There are various subplots that go absolutely nowhere like the sinister cop, Jillain's mum & Chris the boyfriend who are all totally forgotten about & barely make any sort of impact because their screen time & character's are so limited. The dialogue is bland, the character's are poor & the plot is just a boring whodunit with an extremely weak twist ending which doesn't really even qualify as much of a twist since it's what most people will be expecting.

There's a fairly strong anti-Internet char room type message going on here as that is more or less blamed for Jillian's death (but what about the previous victims?) & again religious fanaticism is also hung up as a great evil. Apart from a few drops of blood at the end there is zero gore here, I mean there isn't even a dead body seen & no-one is killed on screen either & it's just as dry as the Sahara desert. The whole film looks like an average made for telly flick with competent if bland production values & a totally forgettable small town setting. There is no tension, atmosphere, nothing builds-up & the cautionary moralising means you'll wish you were elsewhere to...

With a supposed budget of about $500,000 this has reasonable if bland production values. Apparently filmed in Indiana. The acting is alright but the cast can't help make this plodding nonsense any more enjoyable.

Elsewhere is a tedious mystery thriller that is neither mysterious or thrilling, it's predictable & boring & not worth wasting your time with. Get your entertainment elsewhere, but not this Elsewhere if you know what I mean...
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