Up There (15) 80 mins **
This
low-budget supernatural bromance – about a pair of mismatched celestial
functionaries (Burn Gorman and Aymen Hamdouchi) who’ve been grounded somewhere
in Scotland until they can make the numbers in heaven add up – comes to inhabit
its own purgatory: it’s aiming for funny, charming and poignant, but ends up
grey, laboured and nondescript. Writer-director Zam Salim developed it from his
short Laid Off, and it shows. Eight
minutes might have been enough for Salim to get his best material together; at
eighty, Up There feels stretched
indeed, with only crisp, widescreen-filling images from cinematographer Ole
Birkeland (The Arbor) and the odd
funny-faced supporting player to compensate for its yawning stretches of dead
time.
Up There opens in selected cinemas from today.
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