Never Have I Ever
Never Have I Ever is the sole directorial debut from director Damon Rickard and will be having its World Premiere at the 25th edition of the London FrightFest film festival. The blurb for the film is below:
Sam is having a bad day. He is battling an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, is late on a deadline for a writing gig and risks having to pay back an advance he can’t afford to. Then a series of strange incidents start happening to him… A chance encounter whilst drowning his sorrows sends his already bad day spinning in directions he couldn’t have seen coming. All roads lead back to an incident from his youth and a butterfly effect, which sees him embroiled in a continually escalating game of deadly cat and mouse
The character of Sam is played by Andrew-Lee Potts, whom viewers may recognise from several UK genre films, though was memorable to me as the character of Hatter in 2009’s Alice.
We learn early on that Sam is a screenwriter, and very much a functioning alcoholic. Though in the early moments we spend with him, he has a bit of a curmudgeonly charm to him, yeah, he is a bit of a grump, but in a way, it does make him kind of endearing. There is a moment when he has left his house to go to the local pub when he bumps into a young woman on her phone, and after they part ways, you see him mutter “I fucking hate people”, and that made me like Sam, because I too can relate to finding the concept of people incredibly odious. When Sartre said, “hell is other people”, he was not wrong.
Another relatable character moment with Sam was when he is sitting at his laptop and urgently needing to rewrite the script which has now mysteriously been deleted (and he has not created a back-up) and he simply just screams “this is fucking bullshit!”, because I feel that everyone who is a writer can relate to that feeling of desperation when the flow of creativity has fully ceased and you stare at the abyss of the blank page which stares back judging you. The film does a lot of work to get the viewer on the side of Sam, as Sam starts to question what bizarre occurrences are happening around him, the viewer feels just as unsettled, as you on the side of this character.
Sam meets a young woman named Mara (played by Beatrice Fletcher) in the local pub, and Mara has offered to pay for Sam’s drink. The two characters start to hit it off before Mara leaves, though this is the not the last time the two will meet. The next time that Sam is in the pub, Mara asks him to play the drinking game “Never Have I Ever”, but as their drinking game unfolds, we learn that there are higher stakes to this came than we could have ever possibly imagined.
Damon Rickard has crafted a tight and taut thriller which builds tension throughout, to the point where it feels like you could cut the tension with a knife. I would definitely recommend checking out this film when you get the chance.
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