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Disappearance At Lake Elrod [DVD] [2021]

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When another young girl goes missing in the town, Charlie becomes adamant in her belief that the case is related to the unaccounted disappearance of her daughter and starts to personally investigate the incident, bemoaning the apparent incompetence of the local police department and citing a conspiracy. However, as evidence begins to emerge, Charlie becomes a prime suspect herself and takes up the assistance of investigative journalist Amy (Shanola Hampton). Right at the start of the series, you’re introduced to this unique, isolated, island community. How did you get yourself into that mindset? It’s a million miles away from you in LA… Lauren Fash’s debut feature, Disappearance at Lake Elrod takes us to the small, sleepy American town of Elrod, Georgia. Here, we meet Charlie (Robyn Lively), a woman who takes medication and drinks at the local bar as a means of coping with the pent-up anger and grief that she has endured for the past year following the disappearance of her daughter, Lily (Kinsley Isla Dillon). During that time, her relationship with her partner Angela (Bethany Anne Lind) has deteriorated significantly as a result. Michael Trucco: This did not feel like her freshman effort at all. She’s extremely comfortable behind the camera. She’s really comfortable with her with her cast and crew. And that’s the sign of a good leader. I can’t wait to see what she’s going to do next. Because if this is her directorial debut, we’re in for some good things from Lauren. I’ve been doing this for 20 plus years. Women are integral in every facet of filmmaking. But when it comes to right there at the pinnacle, at the directorial level, it is still just dominated by men, largely white men. Why are we not lending a voice to the female directors? It’s sad that in 2021, we’re still having this conversation. Lauren has every business and every right to be standing behind that camera as just as much as anybody else I’ve ever worked for.

Yeah, Midnight Squid Games Mass. That’s the one thing… Our producers were half joking… like, ‘Damn it, Netflix! Really? Did have to put Squid Game and us on the exact same day?’ As for the awkward let’s-explain-everything-in-one-scene climax, the stumblebum exposition might just have you rolling your eyes, thinking that the film might also be suffering from some critical miscasting.Call me simple, but a jumpscare. I love a great sting: loud music, loud noise and in the moment you don’t expect it. That’s the dopamine that I seek out when I’m seeing a horror show.

This is a really fascinating time in media and entertainment. In the last five years, the channels, the explosion of entertainment, and avenues for new content to appear, are endless. That’s created a whole bunch of noise. So for anything to rise above the din, to capture the attention, to be talked about, is such a gift. Trucco, who previously appeared in Flanagan’s 2016 film Hush, added he would do Midnight Mass season 2 ‘in a heartbeat’. But their intensely busy schedule, with multiple new projects already lined up,means ‘their slate is so full …. I don’t know how they would find the time [for Midnight Mass 2]’. Unfortunately, despite its best attempts to shake up the formula and offer something new in the mystery thriller genre, it feels quite generic and its best aspects are underutilised. Ultimately, it is all too easy to be left with a deep feeling of disappointment and thinking about what could have been.Centred around the disappearance of an 8-year-old girl – a mystery that has haunted her mother, Charlie ( Robyn Lively, half-sister to Blake Lively, for those playing at home), leading to bouts of emotional breakdowns and psychological hallucinations – the 90’s set thriller sets itself a year after Charlie’s daughter’s disappearance and the ramifications it has had. Lively portrays Charlie with a tragic stillness, the actress wisely adopting the less-is-more approach as she continues to seek answers from a small town that has essentially vilified her. Not to sound too utopian, but: each other. I just wish people would give a damn a little bit more about each other, and about communication. Because I think there’s a huge breakdown in communication. We’ve lost the human touch. It’s easy to hide behind the keyboard of this device that I’m speaking to you with, and say, and write and do whatever I want. The kind of vitriol that I see that comes across this medium – nobody would ever say that face to face to one another.

Flanagan and production partner Trevor Macy have the ‘Midas touch’ when it comes to creating films and TV series, he says, ‘and as an actor you dream about a scenario where you can be in a creative circle like that’. Though there’s perhaps a few too many “missing kid mystery” tropes adhered to in Disappearance at Lake Elrod– the grieving mother, the potentially corrupt police, the buried secrets coming to life – writer/director Lauren Fash injects enough character development and psychological complexity for it to get away with it. But that has happened to other limited series that have had some degree of success: it was meant to be a one-off but there was so much demand for it.’ You can overlook the odd flub but once clues literally start jumping out in front of our DIY detectives you really have to wonder whether the narrative needed more work. Contrivance is one thing, but what happens here is a step beyond and it makes the whole shebang just too hard to swallow. It’s okay to have differences of opinion. But we are getting pushed to a breaking point. And particularly my country: we’re in this sort of cold civil war, for ideological reasons. This tribalism is terrifying to me. But I choose to see the glass half full, and I choose to be an optimist, and I choose to believe that we can care. We can give a damn about each other.

That community was super important for me to represent and to get right. That was the scaffolding of the character. It’s based on a real island that’s off the coast of Virginia called Tangier. There is a fishing community there. There’s book called Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island. As a small town mystery and a psychological thriller, the film does little wrong, although this is arguably because it rarely sets foot into new territory. In the places where innovations are attempted, these often feel mismanaged. The ones that work are underutilised, whilst the ones that do not are downright ineffective.

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