The Messanger

IMDb
We all want to believe in life after death and imagine loved ones looking over us, feel their presence in a draft of air, or the faint essence of a familiar smell. It's what we crave, knowing they wait for us. But Jack isn't waiting - they won't leave him alone. Some might call Jack a troubled soul, at odds with the world, unable to conform. If you saw him in the pub - disheveled and drunk, talking to himself - you'd stay well away, think he was disturbed somehow, crazy. But Jack has a sharp mind and a razor wit. It's not that he doesn't want to live a normal life, he can't. They won't let him.



Dreadcentral

Jack (Sheehan) is a man living constantly on the edge… of sanity, that is. Appearing to all the world like a pathetic, dishevelled drunk ranting to himself in pub corners, Jack’s problems actually seem to stretch a little further than a mere few unhinged thought processes – because Jack can see ghosts.

Plagued on a constant basis by appearances of the recently deceased, Jack becomes a conduit – the messenger of the film’s title – in his attempts to deliver their final wishes to their loved ones and, finally, put them to rest. This has a devastating impact on Jack’s personal life, though, as his antics see him become a social pariah – kicked out of the local boozer for chatting to a spirit (not the alcoholic kind) and viewed with suspicion and disgust by the majority of people with whom he comes into contact.

Of course, it doesn’t help that he’s a rather neurotic, anxiety-ridden sort prone to aggressive outbursts and self harm. Jack’s latest ghostly client is Mark (Jack Fox), a reporter whose murder was set up to appear as a suicide. Jack is tasked with contacting Mark’s bereaved wife in order to deliver a final goodbye from her husband, but this is easier said than done given the police presence surrounding her – especially the rugged DCI Keane (O’Hara).

Had writer Andrew Kirk and director David Blair taken The Messenger down the route of supernaturally-tinged conspiracy thriller, we may have actually had a compelling piece of work sporting an unusual, neurotic character at the centre of things. Sadly, however, the pair opt to head down the path of damaged character study, drenching the film in an overly stoic, self-important weightiness that is more transparently melodramatic than it is affecting.

Sheehan gives his all, but in confounding unbridled style his character is taken off the rails to become less a sympathetic, downtrodden underdog than a full-blown gurning maniac at times. Given very little narrative direction – the murderous conspiracy behind Mark’s death is barely even scratched upon – The Messenger‘s story meanders and limps its way through various flashbacks of Jack’s childhood and the origins of his abilities in relentlessly po-faced style until, at one point, the audience is forced to join him in his exclamation of “Is there a point to this?!?”

Of course, there is a point, and it’s a genuinely moving one… when The Messenger finally starts to get there. In a solid take on the subject, we’re never quite sure whether Jack can actually see and communicate with the dead or if he is, as others believe, just a broken individual manifesting his own particular method of coping with the past.

The answer isn’t clear, but The Messenger provides a resolution of its own – one that comes superbly delivered with a powerfully emotional gut punch backed up by the film’s tender, moving score. In those final moments it proves one thing – that despite the annoying and nigh-on impenetrable nature of the character, something about Jack’s plight has worked its way under the skin throughout… and it hits hard.

It’s a real pity, then, that the journey towards the finale is such an unfocused, turgid slog – it would be no surprise if many decide to give up long before The Messenger has finished with what it has to say.

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