Release Date: December 5th, 2019
Length: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Genre: Drama
MPAA: Not Rated (But Probably R)
This review is a bit late, but I took a small break from writing reviews for a while because this year has just been overwhelming. But in the last couple days I just got the drive to start writing again (I was also inspired by a really excellent friend of mine to pick up and start writing again so thank you for that).
It is always a humbling and terrifying experience I’ve encountered so far when I get asked to do a review of someones work. I always want to make sure I give (with every review I do) a fair review. I always psych myself out a little bit because I feel like people sometimes don’t care what I have to say or read my reviews, but when I get asked like this I know theres some people out there (other than the crazy amount of bots I get) that appreciate my reviews, so here goes nothing.
Choir Girl (2019) is a Drama film about a lonely photographer named Eugene who becomes fixated on a young street prostitute. What follows feels like a somewhat familiar romp for 90 minutes.
Choir Girl is directed and written by John Fraser. Fraser is a director I’ve not ever heard of, so this is my first film that I watched by him. I felt like this film was poorly directed and poorly written. I didn’t believe the characters and the acting was all over the place. The pacing itself was all over the place as well. I kept time checking as the 90 minute run time felt much much longer. It started off interesting, and then about 20-25 minutes in, my brain just turned off.
The writing in a lot of places felt really forced, like Fraser wanted to say something about immigration and about protecting people, but that was so misconstrued in how he went about telling this story. I felt uncomfortable and strange the entire film, and then theres a really unexpected event that happened at the end of the movie that just completely took me out of it and then it ended.
Choir Girl stars Peter Flaherty as Eugene and Sarah Timm as Josephine. I am not familiar with either one of these actors so to save time I’m just going to combine the both of them under the acting category. I was intrigued with Eugene at first, he felt like a man down on his luck who just wanted to sell his photos to a magazine and earn some money to take care of his ailing father. But as the movie progressed and he got mixed up with Josephine and her problems those seams in the movie just spread too far apart for me. The acting which started out fine, just got worse. Josephine has this very weird and phoney sounding accent that just was degrading after a while and Eugene’s arc was just weird, he started off super creepy and then he was less creepy and then at the end he was creepy again. I didn’t fully understand the plot and the arc that these characters were supposed to have, and then the film ended. Maybe it just wasn’t for me, but I just did not enjoy myself watching this film.
I did however enjoy the interesting black and white cinematography though. I think when used, that black and white films are super interesting, it almost makes every film feel like an ol’ timey detective film. I thought the use of black and white in this movie was well done and it added an edge to the movie.
The score I also enjoyed, I felt like the music fit the film and I could see myself actually listening to this soundtrack in my day-to-day life.
I really don’t like being inherently negative with any review that I write, but Choir Girl (2019) was not a film that I enjoyed and is not a film I would watch again. If I wasn’t asked to review it, I probably would have suffered through it (I don’t like turning off movies), but then just kind of immediately forgot about it.
Choir Girl gets a 1.5/5 from me.
Until Next Time,
Andrew