Buttercup Bill

This moody, Southern gothic psycho-sexual tale certainly has style but it takes too long to reach its inevitable ending.

Pernilla (Bennett, who also co-writes and co-directs) learns that Flora, a childhood friend and one of a trio that formed a tight bond when they were twelve years old, has hung herself in a park. The news stirs memories of a repressed tragedy, and of Patrick (Louisan) - the third friend. Grieving and bouncing around from shots to lines to bar toilet trysts, Pernilla eventually ups sticks and locates Patrick, living in a secluded cabin out in the New Orleans woods. The two drink up a storm, hit the clubs, talk intensely – but never about Flora or the still-to-be-revealed tragedy that happened in their youth – and, crucially, they don’t sleep with each other despite a deep attraction.

But it is only a matter of time. It doesn’t take a lot of detective work to figure out where this is going – a jump in the sack and a flashback to the tragic event that disturbs them so - and Bennett and Richard-Froozan can’t properly disguise its climax. From the opening sequence it’s coming hurtling down the line and Buttercup Bill (the title a reference to an imaginary friend) thereafter plays the waiting game with a series of sequences of the two getting drunk and engaging third parties (strippers, drunken friends) in sex games, sleeping with each other by proxy.

First timers Remy Bennett and Emilie Richard-Froozan certainly have an eye. The opening twenty minutes looks like it was fed through a fevered dream – distorted scenes with the volume on some characters deliberately lower than others, music that changes and again and again, pulling you into a dark and lonely world. This Lynchian opening - a bar singer looks like she could launch into Blue Velvet at any moment – mirrors Pernilla’s disturbed and fractured mind beautifully. It settles down somewhat when she finds Patrick but only to be replaced by a psycho-sexual dynamic that Bennett and Richard-Froozan dare one to untangle (there are some terrific moments as childhood games are revisited but now have an added dark sexual dimension). Both Bennett and Louisan inhabit the characters and revel in the sexual tension that comes with the sweaty confines of Patrick’s tiny cabin.

Bennett and Richard-Froozan have the psychobabble stuff down pat but keeps us waiting too long for a predictable pay off.