Accountable Review: An angry young man tries to gain control after his troubled past in this feature debut of director Matthew Heaven.
Accountable Review
Warren (Oliver Towner) is a man in free-fall. Ground down by his faceless office job and ridiculed by his colleagues, he spends his days getting angry and his nights on the booze. He wakes up with cuts on his knuckles and he has a gun in his drawer. One night his behaviour escalates into violence and the repercussions of this drive him to visit a psychiatrist (Robert Eldridge), who he hopes will help him confront his sizeable demons.
This premise sounds intriguing and a solid enough starting point for Matthew Heaven’s feature-length debut. Sadly my interest ended there, for the writer/director’s Accountable is little more than a workmanlike drama. Not bad, just not great either. It proceeds in an orderly fashion but never quite arrives anywhere you want it to go. Warren is frustrating rather than compelling and his quest lacks an edge as he mopes from scene to scene trying to work his life out. The character is also hampered by a range of standard narrative devices – keeping a diary so we can hear his thoughts and opening up to inanimate objects and the comatose. For a man supposedly incapable of communicating with people he doesn’t half bang on, articulately to boot.
Accountable Review
The least convincing aspect is the romance, which sees Lizzie Davies’ Emma mysteriously drawn to Warren, despite him clearly being a troubled individual. Their connection is never developed, so they’re suddenly a couple and it’s not really explained why. Some of the dialogue sounded off – “What brings you to the graveyard?” is a strange thing to ask someone in a graveyard, but maybe that’s me!
On a positive note, Heaven has made a movie with enough content to fill the running time, something not always understood by first-time filmmakers. You can’t accuse Accountable of running out of steam and its 75 min length covers everything nicely. The film benefits from some decent aerial shots, presumably achieved by drone, and Heaven becomes a bit more adventurous at times, with a drug-fuelled sequence for example. Some more visual flourishes like this could have worked wonders.
I’m puzzled as to why the flick has landed at Frightfest, as it’s not supernatural or horrific in any way. That might be the reason I was disappointed, waiting for someone to be decapitated or slashed to ribbons only for nothing to happen.
The tale has a twist, one I found genuinely surprising and that I’m sure audiences won’t see coming either. Is it enough to justify sitting through the whole story? Probably not. However if you want to see what can be achieved on a 10K budget with a team of committed people you could do worse than give Accountable a shot.
Accountable review by Steve Palace, August 2017.
Accountable is currently playing as part of the Horror Channel Frighfest 2017 programme.
