Fridae

Watching the Twilight saga on film can be a trying experience at times. Robert Pattinson plays a heart-achingly beautiful vampire who seems so convinced of his evil nature as he continuously run away from the franchise’s innocent human protagonist. Except that since he’s a vegetarian vampire who hasn’t ever tasted real blood or commit a single evil thing since his conception, we just don’t know why he’s acting all guilty, depressed, and mopey. Truth be told, we’d even say Edward Cullen is a little too self-absorbed and too fascinated by his non-existent existential crisis to make himself of interest to even a hormonal teen.

How on earth could you possibly follow up your acting career from a role like that? It turns out first-time arthouse director Oliver Irving has a good idea: why not cast Robert Pattinson in a comedy – as a real world version of Edward Cullen, the perpetually mopey and self absorbed almost-adult who is so assured of existence of his existential crisis, and that he must have therapy?

There is subtle comedy in seeing maladjusted people go about their lives: Ben Stiller in Greenberg lurches from one awkward situation to another, while Lei Yuenbing’s ensemble cast in White Days speaks past and above each other in their bonding rituals, ironically and comically building walls of isolation that left everyone alienated. Here, Pattinson’s protagonist has both the ability to turn every social situation into comedy gold while alienating his group of misfit friends, all while torturing the audience with showcases of his musical skills.

The whole set-up gets even better when a real therapist is called in to help him with his problems – and Powell Jones’s mild-mannered self-help guru makes an excellent partner to Pattinson’s comic mayhem.

This is a movie that couldn’t work if Pattinson wasn’t in on the joke. Not only is Irving fully aware and willing to take potshots at the indie genre’s fascination with depressed youth, Pattinson’s deadpan delivery plays up this sense of the ridiculous by making his self-absorbed, self-thwarting dialogue sardonically funny.