Electricity (2014)

Electricity is worth a watch for the stunning visuals, Agyness Deyn's debut performance and the rare insight into epilepsy.

Higgins's adaptation of Ray Robinson's much-admired novel establishes a hypnotic rhythm before deftly shifting towards powerful drama.

The fact that I forgot that I even saw this movie and I also forgot to review it shouldn't dissuade you from giving this a shot. Overall, I would say that this is a pretty good movie, but it's one of those that deludes itself into thinking that it is a great movie and it never quite reached that level. And, if I'm being completely honest, it's a movie that barely reaches the good level as it is. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh to the film, but I just didn't find the story that intriguing. This woman with epilepsy, who also has these hallucinations when she blacks out, tries to find her long lost brother, who got taken away from her home as a teen after an incident, in order to give him his share of the money for his mother's house. The film sees Lily heading to London in order to follow her brother's traces, see if she can finally find the one person that really ever cared for her in her life, even though it's been over a decade since she last saw Mikey, her brother. The fact of the matter is that, in spite of everything, I just don't think that anything really happens in this movie. Lily goes on this search, she meets some people, has epileptic attacks, rinse repeat. There's some character development and Agyness Deyn, who plays Lily, is really good in her role, but there's just something about the movie that leaves a lot to be desired and I can't really put my finger on it if I'm being perfectly honest. This film is based on a book and, dare I say, it doesn't make the transition as smoothly as it probably should. I'm honestly really surprised that they managed to get 90 minute of material out of this story. Because, again, it's just not that interesting of a story that you'd want to see over an hour of it. Maybe the hallucinations were a bigger part of the book and they just wanted to focus more on the characters, Lily's relationship with her brother and her obsession to find him. And that's fine, but I just found that the script to be really lacking. If you had an uninteresting script, then maybe they should've focused more on the hallucinations to disguise from the fact that the story just isn't that good or that intriguing to follow. Now that I think about it, perhaps saying that this film was good is a bit of an exaggeration. A really good central performance isn't enough to make a movie good, you need a strong narrative to go along with that. And not only does this movie not have a good narrative, it's got one that goes way longer than it should've gone. The hallucinations that are there are good and the film does have some interesting ideas that it touches on, like Lily and her refusal to take new medication for her epilepsy, but those ideas are drowned out by the sheer nothingness of everything else that's happening around here. This should've been a better movie, it really should've been. I can't really recommend it because of all the flaws I mentioned. Acting is strong, narrative is super weak, so I can't really recommend it.