Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Just like I count on my South Korean brothers when I need a bloody revenge film, I can count on my brothers from the United Kingdom when I need some kind of offbeat comedic Science Fiction / horror film. ‘Evil Aliens’, ‘FAQ about Time Travel’ and ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’ quickly come to mind. Today’s offbeat Sci-Fi film from the United Kingdom comes to us from filmmaker Nick Whitfield and is a movie he calls ‘Skeletons’ and it most certainly puts the ‘off’ in offbeat.

Bennett (Andrew Buckley) and Davis (Ed Gaughan) are sort of an odd couple who we see traipsing through the lush British countryside in their ill fitting business suits engaged in a conversation. More so Davis is talking and Bennett is receiving. These gentlemen are at work and it looks to me like one of them needs to look into purchasing a motorized vehicle so they don’t have to walk so much. I mean neither of them are in all that great of shape so all this walking really isn’t doing them all that much good.

Nonetheless our duo makes it their destination to perform their task. Davis handles the paperwork for the couple that owns this home and Bennett does the prep work. Bennett isolates the problem, they gear up, they solve the problem and move on their next gig. So what is it exactly that these two men do for a living? Well, I kinda know what they do, but to be honest with you most of this knowledge of what Bennett and Davis do for a living comes from reading synopsis about this movie and less from actually watching this movie. Whitfield chose to go the ‘real life’ route in writing this movie. You see in real life we don’t set aside time for exposition to describe what we do, we just do what we do. The only reason we would tell somebody what we do is if somebody asks us ‘What do you do?’ and that almost never happens. It happens in movies all the time, just not in real life.

Nonetheless Bennett and Davis extract secrets, be they real, dreamed, imagined or otherwise. For instance this first couple wanted to get married and while there is no way we could’ve known what that had to do with anything at the time, now we know they needed to get everything out in the open before they performed their nuptials. I guess. I’m still extrapolating here.

Regardless, these two men do their jobs. Davis has bit of a problem in that he is addicted to the glow, meaning he goes back to experience certain memories which is apparently a no-no in this field. But things are about to change as an important gig is coming up, as presented by their boss The Colonel (Jason Isaacs). Do this job properly and these men get a promotion. As the job goes the husband of Miss Jane (Paprika Steen) has been missing or dead for seven years. Miss Jane has been digging holes in the property ever since searching for his potential remains. Her twenty one year old daughter Rebecca (Tuppence Middleton) hasn’t spoken a word for the last three of these seven years. Miss Jane also has a bright and adorable seven year old son named Jojo (Josef Whitfield). I hate to get sidetracked but if the Good Lord where to bless me and my wife with a daughter to bookend that other thing we have, I’d name this daughter of mine Tuppence. What an awesome name.

Anyway, the job isn’t going so well because nothing is registering on the fancy equipment these men use. Then it does. Hmmm… Also, Davis’ addiction to glowing is starting to get the better of him and the weird daughter is beginning to freak out even more than normal. The Colonel tells these young men to hold on so he can figure some things out, but Davis thinks he’s already figured it out. He hasn’t. And again, to be completely honest, I have no idea what it is that’s not right. Eventually I got it, the Big Picture and all, but those little filler parts in the middle? I didn’t get that.

‘Skeletons’ is a very odd movie but it is an odd movie that I ultimately enjoyed. I certainly wouldn’t have been mad if Nick Whitfield had just gone a little bit more into some of the things that I was supposed to be looking at in this movie. Just a little bit. I think Jason Isaacs was explaining a few things here and there, but hell if I know what The Colonel was saying most of the time. I mean Jason Isaacs probably has a better command of the English language than anybody on the planet earth, but then I read an interview where he felt a need to create a ‘history’ for his character in this movie which included muffled speech as a result of an injury. Actors… I tell you.

But despite the vagueness of the whole exercise, this is real life remember, it is difficult not to get caught up in the story because for one the performances are so engaging, especially Jason Isaacs mush mouth of a Colonel, and the whole vagueness of the exercise did serve the purpose of keeping the viewer in a state of constant curiosity. I don’t know if our curiosity of the events ever completely gets satiated, but I would say this is a movie less about ‘the answer’ and more concerned with the journey to the answer. Buckley and Guagan play off each other wonderfully, not surprisingly since they’ve been playing off of each other for years, Tuppence Middleton… love that name… is oddly enchanting and suitably strange in this film and this movie has an offbeat humor that is prevalent throughout.

‘Skeletons’ is different, that’s for sure. Weird, funny, bizarre, confusing, offbeat and incomplete but satisfying… in strange kind of way.