For those of you who read my review of Mark Kochanowicz last film, Pixel Perfect, in our last film, you know that I felt he was a director with a lot of promise. Well, he’s just finished up a new film, so we’re critiquing it here, just a month and a half after its premiere.
Angela (Heather Dyas-Fried) is a widowed mother who’s at the end of her rope. When creditors threaten to foreclose on the house, she sees no answer other than strapping a plastic bag around her head to join her departed husband.
However, as she walks into the light and gets a chance to talk to her husband Ben (Mark Kochanowicz), she realizes that life isn’t quite what she thought it was. In the end, she must decide to fulfill her suicide by surrendering to death or to fight to regain her life.
Content
Breath of Twilight represents a huge improvement over Kochanowicz’s last film in virtually every respect. The acting is solid, with the main character being someone other than the director himself. (Although Kochanowicz had the second-largest role in the film as Ben, and did a very nice job in the supporting role.) The storytelling is concrete and easy to follow without large loopholes. And, finally, the ending makes sense.
With that said, we must now get into why this is actually a very difficult film to critique.
The difficulty comes because, aside from the fact that the heroine uses the unusual suicide method of a plastic-bag-over-the-head rather than slitting her wrists or OD’ing to kill herself, this film is lacking in the area of innovation, and –by extension—captivation.
The subject of suicide is a very difficult one because it is such a prevalent malady in our society. So, on the one hand, it’s extremely relevant, but, on the other hand, it’s so relevant that nearly every network on the planet has done a host of mini-series, probing inquiries, talk shows, and specials on the subject. As such, it is a topic that really has to be very creatively explored to uncover new ground. Without that new ground covered, it just feels too familiar.
And that’s the chief problem with Breath of Twilight. It honestly feels too much like a very compact cliché, with the too common message: “Don’t kill yourself, because you don’t know how many people you’ll impact.”
Unfortunately, in addition to a stale-feeling message, it deals with a situation where a young mother has lost her husband and has bill collectors after her, which is an image of despair that’s simply been used too many times.
