Kissing Candice

Flawed but has merit

Female sexuality, I think's a huge subject that we don't get to delve into that much and I was really interested in showing that on screen. It's something you always get to see, where the man is the instigator of all the sexual relationships and romances. And I wanted the female in this to be who's going after what she wanted and was being very direct and proactive about that. To me, that's what I have seen in many young women, they are very strong-willed and they have their own wants and I thought that would be an interesting angle for it; that we haven't seen much of it.

• Aoife McArdle; "'I wanted to make a film that was visceral and dangerous and had a woman at the centre'" (Aoife Barry); TheJournal.ie (June 24, 2018)

Kissing Candice is the debut feature from Northern Irish writer/director Aoife McArdle, whose career thus far has been primarily in music videos and commercials (she's probably best known for the controversial American Psycho-inspired video for Bryan Ferry's 2014 song, "Loop De Li", and the truncated short film for U2's 2015 song, "Every Breaking Wave"). When a music video director moves onto features, problems can arise, and Kissing Candice features many of them; the whole thing plays like a two-hour Lorde video, all deep primary colours (especially red) with no discernible diegetic source; self-congratulatory and often belaboured visual symbolism; oblique narrative justification for many of the scenes; an achronological structure with unannounced flashbacks (think Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), except not nearly as well handled), and portentous staring into the middle-distance as the actors emote at one another instead of talking. The film is especially weak in terms of narrative - the entire plot takes up no more than a half hour at most, with the rest all mood and tone.

However, for all that, I rather liked it. The plot, such as it is, is actually built on an interesting enough ho...