OCTANE

Nat is traveling with her mother Senga, with whom she has had a very conflictual relationship for some time, probably due to her mother's recent divorce. Due to a slowdown caused by an accident, mother and daughter decide to stop at a service station waiting for the road to be cleared. The two meet a girl who asks them for a ride, but upon arriving at her destination, the hitchhiker disappears into the woods. Nat and Senga continue their journey, but after an argument, Nat runs away, and the mother just has time to see her get on a minibus with the hitchhiker from before. From that moment on, the woman will search for her daughter. Promising start: a fatal accident on the highway with the only survivor trying to get out of the wreckage; help arrives, but those who at first seem like highway police turn out to be mysterious assassins in uniform. The prologue is therefore interesting, with an intriguing déjà-vu that brings to mind the Cronenbergian "Crash"; but a few minutes after the opening credits, it already starts to feel that something is not right. The main characters of "Octane" are a mother and daughter in conflict, a conflict given by the mother's excessive sense of protection and fueled by her recent divorce from her husband, whom the daughter was very attached to. A situation that has been proposed and repeated in genre cinema (and not) in all forms and is now seriously becoming an annoying cliché to describe shaky but predictably destined-to-reconcile family relationships. As the minutes pass, "Octane" continuously loses its grip, becomes unbelievably repetitive, constantly focused on the back-and-forth on the highway of the two women, showing an evident poverty of the subject and above all a weak screenplay. In addition to the repetitiveness of the action, Stephen Volk's screenplay ("The Kiss of Evil"; "The Tree of Evil") does not present a sufficient characterization of the characters who, in addition to the stereotypical protagonists, features an anonymous and inconsistent villain and a useless co-protagonist. The protagonists are played by Madeleine Stowe ("We Were Soldiers"), as the mother, and Misha Barton (the TV series "The O.C.") as the daughter, accompanied by an unsuitable Jonathan Rhys Meyers ("Match Point") as the turn's villain, more similar to a model from a Calvin Klein ad campaign than a sadistic clan leader. Rather intrusive is then the character played by Norman Reedus ("Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns"; "Balde 2"), put there to explain what is happening, explanations that remain, however, confused and fragmented. Marcus Adams' direction ("Long Time Dead") is rather careful, but the frequent music video-style editing, the fastidiously sweetened photography, and the soundtrack almost exclusively composed of dance tracks make the package rather indigestible. Given the cast of young handsome people, the formal aspect, and the music used, and the complete absence of "strong" scenes, it can be inferred that the average target of this product are girls belonging to the new MTV generation, a shame that "Octane" also turns out to be damn boring, thus partly also alienating the younger audience in search of entertainment. In short, "Octane" is a bad film all around, difficult to recommend to anyone.