A divorced father takes his teenage daughter to a cabin close to the
world's largest nuclear power station.
Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Aaron Poole
Starring: James Gilbert, Ciara Alexys
As the so-called King of Pain once threatened, "De do do do, de da da da
is all I want to say to you," except in writer/director
Aaron Poole's (no relation) road movie Dada, such reductive prattle is insufficient to an artsy two hander where a
vacationing family travel to a nuclear power plant by accident and the
ensuing drama is completely reliant upon their verbal interactions.
Drawing on Poole's experience as a single father, the film seems intensely
personal from the moment his avatar, divorced dad Adam (James Gilbert), picks up daughter Kai (Ciara Alexys) and the two play silly
games to pass the drive time (an early indicator of their estrangement:
surely you'd be catching up with the kid?). A generational divide is
implicit in Kai's choice of music, but in this part of the narrative the
relationship of the two is ostensibly amicable, almost idealistically
so...
The in media res approach of the opening, along with the in-joke
exclusivity of Kai and Adam's games and the implied ambiguity of the
whereabouts of Kai's mother, is faintly Brechtian. The disaffection is
furthered by patience testing sequences of blurry landscapes seen from the
car: the film suggesting that there is some point here, a puzzle to be
configured. In keeping with the film's themes of duality, from the
repeated syllable of the title to the yin yan of the characters,
Dada duly follows a diptych structure. Almost to the minute,
the first half of Dada is a meander with the two characters
that establishes a can't-quite-put-your-finger-on-it weird atmosphere and
their (increasingly) strange relationship.
As the title implies, the film is resolutely sui generis, with Poole
inflecting different genre tropes as part of the surreal collage; what
begins as a road movie morphs into horror throughout, most notably in
sleekly creepy sequences where a ghostlike maternal figure watches and
interacts with Kai at night (notably scary moments - I just had a little
shiver recalling it!), and the building dread (a magical act on the part
of Poole, as you cannot tell where it's coming from) ends in a cacophonous
finale in which characters defy the decided laws of physics.
Where Dada cuts the deepest is in its human interactions,
specifically when the mutually agreed façade of cordiality between Kai and
Adam disintegrates into arguments of the painfully recognisable manner of
family members who have fallen out. The film excels at exploring these
father/daughter dynamics with an emphasis on the former fraction. Adam is
feckless, increasingly unable to communicate with his child, and
frustrated with it. He loves Kai, although this is not necessarily a
positive, with this emotion being the overwhelming, sustained
preoccupation of fatherly love; a churning worry that she is safe, and
that the world will be kind to her. For the selfish, like Adam, it is a
love that can occasionally congeal to resentment: an inconvenient heart
ache which will never, ever shift. It doesn't help matters that Kai is a
right pain in the arse at points, too. She takes Adam's phone, and, in
accessing it, sees some of his sexting - cringe. As the film spirals she
pretends that he doesn't actually exist, as with increasing desperation he
impotently scolds her, screaming and swearing at his teenage daughter.
Are Kai and Adam materially existent within the diegesis? When they
interact with other people - in diners, with other campers - Kai seems
absent. In an early moment, Kai tells a bizarre campfire story about a
girl who has a ghostly double which appears when she visits a campsite;
the synchronicity to her own situation is too close for it not to be
allegorical.
Dada, an explicitly Canadian film, nonetheless invokes Australian horror,
with its use of scary landscape and emblematic narratives.
Long Weekend is a touchstone, with a resentful couple going
mad in the wilderness, but also Picnic at Hanging Rock with
its oblique bleakness. The film's title is generally synonymous with the
surreal but is a movement which differs significantly from the earlier
school of Surrealism: inextricably linked, Dada harnessed certain
tenements of the previous mode in order to challenge society/the status
quo. Poole suggests that his film is a protest against ecological
destruction, but, for this reviewer at least, such a message was lost in
the noise of strangeness and eerie narrative implications. Held together
by the superlative performances, Dada ultimately intrigues
more than it satisfies.
Dada is on Canadian VOD from
January 28th. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
