Nina Forever
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Starring: Abigail Hardingham, Cian Barry, Fiona O'Shaughnessy
Directors: Ben and Chris Blaine
Duration: 98 minutes
It's hard enough to leave your exes behind without them constantly dropping in every time you're trying to get hot and sweaty with a new flame.
What's worse for Rob (Cian Barry) is that he didn't break up with Nina (Fiona O'Shaughnessy) so much as she died in a car crash.
"I'm not an ex," she calmly explains to him after emerging as a broken body in a pool of blood in the bed next to him and his new girl Holly (Abigail Hardingham).
"You're dead!" he protests.
"That doesn't mean we're on a break though, does it?" is Nina's snotty reply.
Nina Forever is the most old-fashioned kind of ghost story, the dead as a metaphor for all the baggage the living must carry forward. The debut feature from brothers Ben and Chris Blaine works because it sizes up every edge of this haunting, finding real grief tucked next to bitingly dark humour, the muddled desires of the living splattered with the dark requests of the dead.
Case in point is Holly, who is attracted to Rob precisely because of the dark cloud that seems to hang over him.
"I'd love it if my boyfriend tried to kill himself if I died," she tells some of her supermarket co-workers about Rob, who is whiling away his mourning period as a stock boy. "Imagine (having sex with) someone that intense."
Freshly dumped by a guy who insisted she was nice and vanilla, Holly clearly sees a chance to indulge her twisted side with a man everyone else treats like an imminent suicide case.
She certainly gets more than she bargains for. Initially as freaked out as anyone would be at having a corpse pop up every time your new beau slips your panties off, she rather quickly tries to make hay. By the second session, she is trying to involve Nina in a beyond-the-grave three-way, thinking maybe mutual happiness will keep her sated.
It will not, of course: There's no living with the dead, and not just because, as Nina harshly points out, she has a shard of glass in the back of her throat, which makes pleasure a little hard to come by.
Hardingham expertly plays Holly's attempts to both know and impose herself on Rob, somewhere between desperate selfish yearning and honest empathy for his pain.
Rob's problem is he might be feeling a surfeit of empathy: Still dropping by Nina's parents' place for dinner, he seems as ultimately reluctant to move on as they are. Though as a screaming fight between them later hashes out, this entire grief pile — Rob, Holly, the parents, even Nina herself — is all about slowly getting over things, together, even as bitterness, anger and sadness linger.
It's one of many sophisticated messages the Blaines slip in among the graveyard humour and the genuinely sweet growing love of Rob and Holly. And it's what makes the movie so special: By dropping a dead girl into the proceedings, they open up the lives of a lot of the people around them.
Nina Forever is a grimly clever example of a movie that's as thoughtful about the blood splattering the sheets as it is about the blood still running through its characters.
