Blur Circle Review: Oscar Bait

First up on the Dallas VideoFest 29 line, we’ve got Blur Circle. I came into this motion picture blindfolded, and the result was…

Jill Temple (played by Cora Vander Broek) is desperate to get to the bottom of where her son disappeared to, even after a two-year failure search and the investigation starting to give up on the case.

She soon meets a man named Burton Rose (played by Mathew Brumlaw) who’s also got a tragic event happened to his family member, but adapts in a different way. Jill must learn to move on and enjoy life’s future moments, wide open to finding her son, but also to the possibility that it will never happen.

I’m going to start off with the good, because there is good to be had here. Without saying anything about the quality of the film, I must praise the cinematography for professionally capturing each scene of the story with smooth shots and tight focus on its visual information. I really dig the work that went into filming each of the scenes because for the most part, the scenery here is timeless.

I can see that Cora Vander Broek pulls it all as Jill Temple, delivering the type of stress and emotions you’d realistically see with a single mom who’d deal with this kind of situation. I’d be very interested in seeing what else Cora can do in her acting career.

The immediate problem with this is that the message just cannot be as believable and moving as it clearly wants to. There’s an existing show called “Long Lost Family”, which goes over families grieving in depression for decades over their disappearing children, that ends with the family concluding their search, instead of learning to get over it.

Even looking past this hit show, no family or friend are ever going to give up finding the answer to their missing loved ones without forever being changed negatively. No one is going to take it lightly after any year and file their missing other under “probably deceased”.

I’m only harping about this subject so much because this flick tries way too hard to move or influence you with its message and plot that it forgot to make its characters interesting. Cora is a super talented figure, but she’s given more of behavior test in an acting guild rather than a strong character to work with. The two other main stars come off as creepy, yet stereotypical.

Like Concussion (starring Will Smith) for example, you have here a great base and a genially good cast that suffers from the director trying hard to grab those trophies instead of letting his strengths speak for itself. Burton is a modern-day redneck and Earl Ambrose (played by Ryan Artzberger) is the wise old man, owning a repair center.

They oversaturate on the dramatic tone that the times when the film tries to crack some witty jokes or be lighter as the above screenshot demonstrates, it comes off as random and awfully cringe worthy.

I almost feel like the movie is too serious to the point that it tries to jump back with humanity at the last second, not figuring out how these jokes could land. A dude Instagraming a couple making out in front of a washing machine should have been funny, but I only cringe hard that its unfitting with the setting.

You don’t need to be funny in order to tell a good story with your f\motion picture and if it’s not your thing, then don’t do it. By the time I was done watching, I could only recall other flicks I saw that tried aggressively hard to be inspirational that the results fall flat on its face due to poor writing and inconsistency. After that, I drank some Dr.Pepper and immediately forgot what I saw.

Blur Circle is dry drama with nothing to pull your interest in while giving you the message that the director probably doesn’t want you to hear or see. There are so many big budget movies like this one, both for better and worse.

If you love drama flicks and don’t care for rate of substance, this is for you. Otherwise, drink Diet Dr.Pepper, because that at the very least tastes far greater than Oscar Bait.