A young woman repressed the memory of having killed someone when she was twelve years old. Thirteen years later that memory comes back.
“Unintended” begins with a young girl, Lea (Hannah Westfield), and her friend, Jamie (Benjamin Hutchings), running through the woods until they reach a cliff’s edge. The pair dare each other to jump into the large river below and Lea bravely dives in and emerges. Jamie refuses to jump in and says he has to head home. All alone, Lea begins to have a tea party with her dolls. In a bizarre creative choice, the dolls turn into humans and begin whimsically dancing in her yard. I don’t know what the writers were trying to do here. Her Uncle Sam (Sean Cullen) seems to have a good relationship and warns Lea to stay away from a local homeless man dressed like a vaudevillian juggler.
The next day Lea is back in the woods and notices her toys have been stolen. She confronts the local curly-haired bully Bill (Jay Jay Warren) about her missing items. Bill is shooting (poorly) at beer cans and after a very contrived confrontation, the gun goes off and down goes Bill. Lea frantically runs to Sam’s and after no response, she heads to Bill’s mom’s house. Bill’s mom introduces herself as Molly (Amy Hargreaves) and has a hard time standing up straight due to being very intoxicated. Meanwhile, her boyfriend is belligerently searching their dilapidated house for his handgun. The boyfriend sends Lea away and before a resolution, the film’s setting jumps to years later and Lea is now an adult (Elizabeth Lail). Older Lea is not doing well, she’s facing eviction, gets harassed by men on the street, and clearly depressed. The only foreseeable way out of her present conundrum seems to be returning home to where everything happened in the past.
I appreciate that writer/director Anja Murmann is trying to navigate themes like trauma and depression but “Unintended” is too slow and unfocused. Elizabeth Lail was great in the recent Netflix series “You” but her character is so thinly written that I doubt even Cate Blanchett could make her interesting. A couple of other solid character actors round out the sparse cast but every scene and person feels so flat. I think Murmann should watch more films by auteur Lynne Ramsay. Ramsay is a master of concocting fractured traumatic past events into a thrilling and emotional experience like “We Need to talk about Kevin” and “You Were Never Really Here.” Hopefully, the cast will end up with a better project next time.
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