In short: Grand Isle (2019)

The South, USA. Buddy (Luke Benward), a young husband and father working handyman-style small jobs to survive, is questioned by a policeman (Kelsey Grammer) who doesn’t cop to fancy city stuff like lawyers and phone calls in connection with some sort of violent crime. Buddy certainly looks as if he has gotten put through the wringer by someone. Most of the film takes place in flashback, Buddy telling Mr Cop a sordid tale that begins with him tasked to repair a fence for alcoholic vet Walter (Nicholas Cage) and his very, very hospitable wife Fancy (KaDee Strickland), continues with him stranded in the couple’s house by a hurricane, contains (awkward) sex, murder plans and a bag full of money and doesn’t quite end with a terrible discovery in a cellar.

Stephen S. Campanelli’s Grand Isle suffers from a bad tendency to drag its plot hither and yon, clearly aiming for the erratic feel of a Southern Noir yet still often making the impression of a film that doesn’t quite know what exactly it wants to be: said noir or a twisty modern thriller or a trashy 90s erotic thriller or serial killer chiller or whatever kind of movie those final scenes think they belong to? The film can’t decide, instead jumping through elements of all of these genres, bizarrely missing exactly the themes that so often connect them.

Of course, the film never comes to a consistent portrayal of its protagonist either, leaving Buddy with the weak backbone of a noir, erotic thriller etc protagonist but without other character traits, moral values or what have you which you’d usually be able to better explore thanks to that noir backbone. It’s a series of scenes, usually not even bad ones, that never gel into a movie.

The acting side doesn’t help with the Buddy problem either: Benward does not have the kind of presence capable to work on the same level of Cage even when he’s more going through the motions than outright crazy as here, or as Strickland’s frighteningly sexually aggressive Fancy, so the film misses yet another possible throughline here.