I was not murdered. 2021

After watching gonzo I thought it’d be cool to watch another feature length student film and I saw this pop up in letterboxd so I thought fuck it. I mean it’s harder to write serious reviews for student films coz I don’t wanna offend anyone, so ima start with everything I really liked about it.  (Again I’m rating this like any other film so if it gets past a 2/10 that’s a compliment as it’s rated on the same scale as stuff like The Batman) Script was well written, it was pretty funny sometimes. As it went on it started getting really interesting, I really liked it when the second guy finally interacted with the girl, and there were cool details like her wearing the glasses and her talking to him and him being the dead one, I got really invested in the story at the end. I also think a lot of my main issues with the film were resolved pretty well at the end.  Acting was good especially from the main guy. The second guy was a good actor but his character was kinda dumb and a little weird…. A bit of a dick too, why’d he keep insisting she was alive and insistent on strip searching her. Did they not check her pulse? Also if you think she’s alive call the ambulance lol. And why’d he keep calling her an attention seeking whore, that was a little weird. The main guy tho I did like, he was also dumb sometimes but the acting was surprisingly quite good. Although it was annoying that when he called 911 someone else picked up and he never tried using another phone considering the circumstances. I liked how it kept cutting back to him talking to the dead girl in black and white that was a pretty cool narrative technique.  Some of the Edgar Wright type stuff was really cool, like the opening when he’s shouting “what?” Out the window, or the quick cuts when they scan her finger print (that was cool but then they did it for every single finger and it ruined it), if it was filmed a little better with a big crew I probably would have loved the film a lot.  Cool title credits of the dead body.  Cons  Editing and shots could have been better, there were moments where I could hear the camera mans footsteps so I guess the audio could have been better too, but I guess for a student film stuff like this is quite difficult so it’s really impressive what they managed to accomplish.  I think this film could have been a lot better since it had such a good script if it had less cuts, sometimes I’d be kinda engaged in the story and there’d be a weird unnecessary cut to a close up and it takes me out a bit. Or maybe they could have just made the cut feel a little more natural I don’t know. (Though as the film went on I stopped noticing this more and more, it just felt a little messy at the start) If I’m being honest I don’t think this film was amazing though there was a lot of good about it, I think some of the ideas the director had were great, and if some of the bad things were fixed this film would be really good. If his guy makes anymore films I would probably watch them as I think he’s pretty talented. I would like to film something with him some time since I’m pretty sure Adam goes to my uni.  Was the dead girl sitting up watching them in the background a mistake or was this like a Swiss army man type situation ? I know she’s alive (kind of) later so I dunno if that was intentional.  This was a really weird film and once I expected the fact it was just plain weird I enjoyed it. Was pretty cool.  4.0/10