The High Cost of Living (2011)
Average Rating: 5.5/10
Reviews Counted: 14
Fresh: 7 | Rotten: 7
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 5.8/10
Critic Reviews: 6
Fresh: 2 | Rotten: 4
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 695
My Rating
Movie Info
THE HIGH COST OF LIVING is the story of a young pregnant woman whose world falls apart when she loses her baby in a hit and run accident. It starts with an accident. Henry (Zach Braff) makes a wrong turn and crashes into Nathalie (Isabelle Blais). In a fit of panic, and over the legal limit, he cuts and runs, leaving Nathalie lying in the street, unconscious, bleeding and eight months pregnant. She wakes up in the hospital only to find her bright future destroyed and the baby she is still
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Cast
-
Zach Braff
Henry -
Isabelle Blais
Nathalie -
Patrick Labbé
Michel -
Julian Lo
Johnny
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All Critics (14) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (7) | Rotten (7) | DVD (2)
So artistically well-intentioned and earnest in its ambitions that you can almost forgive the banality of its every scene.
Top CriticMovies often make too much of that truism, but surprisingly committed performances from actors like these can still make it feel like something meaningful.
Ridiculously implausible yet still predictable.
Chow and her actors are so gifted that this fragile situation escapes contrivance to become a poignant, romantic and deftly nuanced revelation of character and emotions.
An already iffy premise is badly served by a film that is tonally jarring.
Although there are moments when lead thesps Zach Braff and Isabelle Blais just about pull off the implausible conceit, the pic still suffers from major problems of tone as well as stilted camerawork and editing.
An engaging movie about commingled grief and regret, well staged and captured by cinematographer Claudine Sauve in a manner that works with the material to effect a depressive, melancholic tone.
The High Cost of Living is yet another example of the high cost (for moviegoers) of lowered production barriers for aspiring filmmakers.
Now this is drama!... just throws the most awful situation at her characters and watches them deal with it.
Off-beat delivery and acting redeem this modestly budgeted "redemption" story.
Chow's direction shows a good eye for locations, but her gritty nighttime aesthetic can't cloak the predictable nature of the material, which only really has one way to go and staggers there down the home stretch.
I'm still not sure how The High Cost Of Living made it onto Canada's Top Ten, let alone how it took the best Canadian first feature award at TIFF last year. It's just not very good.
...a decidedly off-kilter premise that's utilized to pervasively agreeable effect by filmmaker Deborah Chow...
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May 12, 2011:
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