Radius

Radius Of The Lost Arc

Radius
Canada 2017
Directed by 
Caroline Labrèche & Steeve Léonard
Epic Pictures

Warning: A radial pattern of full spoilerage coming your way as you start reading this one.

Okay... I discovered Radius by accident, thought the basic premise looked halfway decent and decided to give it a punt. What a shame then that, after the first two thirds of this movie proved intriguing and suspenseful, the writer/director team kind of drop the ball and do what a lot of modern Doctor Who episodes have been doing for the last ten years or so, namely explain the central concept away with a throwaway, blink and you’ll miss it, pseudo-scientific piece of claptrap and then concentrate on what turns out to be the much less surprising aspect of the movie... and pretend that is the twist reveal instead. 

However, it does start off in a wonderfully high concept, apocalyptic way and so let me just talk you through the double set up because, even though the last 20 or so minutes is pretty dire, you will still have a fun time getting there, I think. 

So the film starts off after a car accident on a rainy night. We meet the person who seems to be the sole survivor, Liam, played by Diego Klattenhoff. Well I say his name is Liam but we don’t know that yet... and neither does he. As it soon turns out he’s completely lost his memory. Then, when he tries to flag down a car, it almost runs him over as it runs itself off the road, the driver dead with her eyes misted over. Then a bird drops dead from the sky. What’s going on? Liam finds a lone diner and goes inside... but all the customers are dead. Is this a gas attack? He finds his drivers licence and manages to find out where he lives. He drives there and as he is trying to figure out just who he is, a person approaches him and promptly drops dead. After a while, he realises that there is no gas or viral attack... every time someone gets within about 20 yards of him, they just drop dead. 

Then, as he holes up in his shed, since the police are looking for him in relation to these unexplained deaths, a girl comes knocking at his house. He tells her not to come close but, before he knows it she is knocking on the shed door... except she shouldn’t have been able to get that far. The woman is called, well, he calls her Jane (played by Charlotte Sullivan) but, she doesn’t know what her actual name is but, police identified the car she was in as his car. She too survived the same crash but has absolutely no memory of who she is or why she is there. And then, when they try to stealthily find out what’s going on, it becomes clear that Liam doesn’t kill people within a certain radius of his body anymore... unless the girl steps outside that radius. Then people will fall down dead around him. So the two try to find little memory jogs from their life before to try and figure out what’s going on, both of them now under suspicion by the police and subject to a nationwide manhunt.

And that’s the thing and, I really wish that was the only premise that the writers were going to be pursuing here because that really is enough. Alas, they then try and add another twist and, it’s the one twist that I would imagine most audiences are going to guess... especially once we approach the end of the film and it’s quite obvious that ‘some weird space lightning caused them to become this way’ is the only explanation we’re going to get for what has happened to them, to make them two halves of an inadvertent killing machine. So yeah, by that point, the revelation has to therefore be something unrevealed about the identity of the two people and, yeah, it won’t take the audience more than a few moments to realise that one of them is a serial killer and they were not necessarily friends after all, before the space lightning caused their amnesia and made them the way they are. 

And yeah, what a let down eh? Also, by that point, despite not having any real vague explanation as to the science behind their condition, you realise there’s only one way this can now end and, yeah, you’ll probably be right on the money with that one too, I would think.

It’s shot nicely, it’s competent and there are some nice set pieces to it for sure. Such as when they are at the hospital and Liam gets shut in a crowded elevator without Jane, and she has to run down the stairs to try and keep up with the elevator so that everyone in there apart from Liam doesn’t drop dead. And the directors aren’t afraid to not fill half the shot with movement, sometimes nicely pitching a close up of a face to one side of the screen with nothing much going on in the rest of the shot. And it’s nicely acted and the effect of people and animals suddenly dropping dead with their eyes misting over in grey is pretty chilling too.

So, all being said and done, I quite enjoyed a lot of the elements of Radius but, I can’t really quite recommend it because the main conceptual hook... and it’s a really great one... is just not given any real play once the writers decide to move on from it and I felt that this was the core of the movie and not necessarily the personality reveals on the two central protagonists. So yeah, a nice piece of high concept science fiction but with the guts taken out of it by a lack of any real explanation to that premise by the end of the picture. Sometimes it’s not enough to just resolve the problems of the central characters... the audience needs to really understand these problems too.