Concussion

Concussion begins with a group of women talking about their appearance and ways to improve it, followed by several shots showing said women tiring themselves out on exercise bikes scored to Oh! You Pretty Thing by David Bowie. The opening suggests a comedy with a real satirical edge, but Concussion soon develops into a moody, muted drama about Abby (Robin Weigert), who doesn’t know what she wants.

This time, however, the suffocating family is a lesbian couple with two kids, and Abby’s solution is to become a prostitute for other lonely and unsatisfied women. This is ultimately where the originality ends, since Abby still has a big, well-appointed house and materialistic friends – the lesbian element to the film being primarily incidental in the same way as 2010’s The Kids Are All Right.

Writer-director Stacie Passon directs with restraint and the film’s overall tone is one of suffocation and stagnation, which fits the themes of the film well, but it has been done before. Passon is more interested with hitting the typical story beats – an awkward chance meeting with a client in a local supermarket, forgetting to pick the kids up from school – and problematically avoids addressing in any depth the complicated issues concerning prostitution in the present day.

Weigert gives a good performance, though it is a fairly passive role and a necessarily underwritten one. Passon’s script puts just enough of a personal mark on certain scenes so that they don’t feel too redundant, and there is a commendable attempt to make a film that is genuinely about women. It could have addressed less traditional, much more difficult issues. The opening promises an angry, funny film with bite, but Concussion is happy to be just another quiet, inoffensive drama about an unfulfilled middle class woman.

Matthew McKernan

Concussion is released nationwide on 16^th May 2014.

Watch the trailer for Concussion here: