SON OF THE SUNSHINE (Ryan Ward). 87 minutes. Now playing at the Carlton. See Listing. Rating: NN
SON OF THE SUNSHINE (Ryan Ward). 87 minutes. Now playing at the Carlton. See Listing.
First-time filmmakers have a tendency to shoot the moon – to cram every single one of their ideas into their movie just in case they never get the chance to make another. Usually, a good editor will walk them back in post-production, shaping the material to focus on its strengths and play down its weaknesses.
That doesn’t seem to have happened with Son Of The Sunshine.
Director, co-writer and star Ryan Ward goes full-tilt in his first feature, the magic-realist tale of a young Toronto man (Ward) with Tourette syndrome who undergoes experimental surgery to rid himself of the tics, only to find out that losing his affliction also means giving up his supernatural ability to heal the sick and dying.
It’s Flowers For Algernon meets Resurrection as filtered through the faux grime of Ed Gass-Donnelly’s recent This Beautiful City. Every moment is agitated and abrasive, with Ward encouraging every last one of his actors to go as big as possible, and piling on one self-consciously gritty element after another. Even Rebecca McMahon, as the binge drinker who represents our hero’s first real romantic love, has a scene where she storms out of a rom-com screaming about how artificial movies are.
Ward fully commits to his performance, and hints at an intriguing visual sensibility in the film’s early scenes, but he quickly turns Son Of The Sunshine into maudlin misery porn, short-changing the characters to see just how far he can push the audience’s tolerance for artful suffering. In addition to the mysticism and Tourette’s, the script also crams in heroin addiction, alcoholism, abusive relationships and intimations of incest.
Any two would have been enough, really.
