That Mia Wasikowska knows how to fill a screen, doesn't she? The Canberra-born 22-year-old, who played one of the siblings in the ingratiating lesbian marriage comedy The Kids are All Right, and the main roles in Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland, stars here as a young woman with a very short life expectancy.
She avoids the wan and haggard invalid look - it's a brain tumour that gets her, not a wasting metastatic cancer - and slowly but surely lets the camera (and us) in close. Actresses, particularly young ones, who can take intense close-ups without a trace of self-regard are not a dime a dozen. Expect to see plenty more of this woman in the years to come.
The bad news is that her talent is frittered away here in an achingly banal weepie which puts a disease victim with a depressed outsider, lights the fuse and lets us watch as it fizzles out.
The outsider is Enoch (Hopper), a troubled teenager who spends his days crashing strangers' funerals - a morbid pastime whose origins soon become clear. At one such service he meets Annabel (Wasikowska), the first person in a while who treats him as interesting rather than twisted. Their tentative friendship becomes heavily freighted with mawkish sentiment once she admits that her association with the city cancer clinic is not, as she first told him, as a volunteer.
Enoch's character, the disaffected teenager learning through pain, is a popular archetype in American indie cinema (think Napoleon Dynamite and Juno), aimed mainly at audiences who have never heard of Catcher in the Rye (or Hamlet for that matter). But he's seriously ill-formed. With his artfully mussed hair and shy smile, Hopper, the son of Dennis, has his dad's good looks and none of the geeky originality he needs to draw us to him. He remains frustratingly out of focus and the film does, too.
