Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Dan Kay
Starring: McKenna Grace, Jojo Regina, Dacre Montgomery, Jesse Williams, Forrest Goodluck, Malia Baker
A pair of stellar performances from two young leads elevates this Southern-set movie that can't quite decide whether it wants to be a kitchen sink drama or a thriller. What We Hide shares the same setup as the excellent 2023 Swedish drama Paradise is Burning, that of young sisters hiding their mother's absence out of fear of being separated by the authorities. In a curious coincidence, the teenage protagonist here sports the same distinctive wolf art t-shirt as one of the girls from its Swedish cousin. But while both films boast great turns by young actresses and share a similar premise, the two movies are markedly different in terms of quality.
In Paradise is Burning, the absent mother had simply vanished. Here she is found dead from an overdose in the opening scene, her corpse discovered by her daughters, 15-year-old Spider (McKenna Grace) and 11-year-old Jessie (Jojo Regina). Knowing that the state will most likely split the sisters apart, Spider decides to hide her mother's body in a trunk in their shed. Of course, it's not that simple. She needs to fend off the attention of her mother's drug-dealing boyfriend Reece (Dacre Montgomery), the local Sheriff (Jesse Williams) and a child services officer (Tamara Austin).
Any suspense and tension that might be mined from this scenario is fluffed by Dan Kay's TV movie direction and an equally uninspired script. As menacing a scuzball as Montgomery is in a retread of his Stranger Things bad boy shtick, Reece's threats simply don't loom large enough. His antagonist pops up every now and then, more to remind us that he exists rather than to ramp up the tension. Similarly, the characters of the sheriff and the social worker are written as being unfeasibly terrible at their jobs, purely so Grace's ruse can be prolonged long enough to fill a feature length run time. Grace's quest to get a fake ID that she believes will allow her to adopt her sister has none of the ticking clock tension such a scenario requires.
In better hands What We Hide might play like a Southern Gothic Safdie brothers movie. In Kay's hands it's all too pleasant for a drama/thriller set in a rural working class community devastated by the opioid crisis. There's a lot of talk about how awful everything is, but there's very little of this desperation shown on screen. Kay and cinematographer Pip White over-light their scenes, and the movie never visually reflects Grace and Jessie's anxiety. At best it resembles a network TV movie of the week; at worst it's dogged by amateurish staging, with eyelines distractingly failing to match.
And yet for all its flaws, What We Hide manages to hold our interest thanks to the excellent work of its two young leads. Grace shows why she is a rising star with the best turn of her nascent career. As if aware that she can't rely on the subpar script she's lumbered with, Grace uses her physicality to portray Spider, her tough facade betrayed by a slight stoop that suggests she's spent her life keeping her head down. Spider doesn't have much cause to smile, but when she does, either in the presence of her chipper kid sister or the sensitive boy (Forrest Goodluck) who introduces her to photography, Grace's beam is that of a movie star. As her innocent foil, Regina has an adorable chemistry with Grace. The movie's best scenes are those that see the two sisters ribbing each other while attempting to make house and living on a diet of cheese balls and mac and cheese. Grace and Regina win us over, sucking us into what is otherwise a clunky and cliché-riddled drama.
What We Hide is on UK/ROI VOD from February 16th.
