Jethica

Elena lives by herself in an old trailer out in the middle of nowhere, outside of her small town in New Mexico, after hitting someone while texting and driving. Then one day, she randomly sees an old friend named Jessica. Jessica is back in town because she is also hiding out, but from a stalker named Kevin. The two decide to have coffee and reconnect, but then Kevin shows up outside of Elena’s trailer, and the pair of old friends realize that they must rely on supernatural means in order to get rid of him… for good.

Jethica was obviously shot for like… two dollars.

Despite this, it still looks pretty good, and really makes some good use of the stark snow-dusted high desert landscape of New Mexico, but in every other way, it’s a hit and miss film.

First off, this is a “supernatural desert suspense comedy” film, and for being a genre movie, the rules when it comes to dealing with supernatural stuff are way too soft and easy, which makes it feel like a dilettante’s genre film, as people who are more into the sci-fi/horror/western/fantasy end of things know without being told… the rules are an important part of the world.

It’s also hard to say whose story this is supposed to be.

Elena hardly speaks, or even shows any emotion at all, acting as more of an plot-answer box, always ready with the outlandish solutions. Meanwhile, Jessica is the one with the most immediate issue, but she mostly just stands around looking concerned. These aren’t bad performances. In fact, the cast is great. The problem is the character who gets the most development is Kevin, which is an odd—and perhaps unfortunately personally revealing—choice on the part of the film’s creators, being that Kevin is the abusive stalker in the equation, so it feels a little weird how he gets turned into the most sympathetic character.

Worst of all, even at only 72 minutes, the film definitely loses focus about 3/4ths of the way through, almost as if this was a initially a short film, and it got stretched as much as it possibly could in order to be considered a feature-length film.

That last bit is the film’s main problem.

There’s a lot of big ideas here, fun ideas worth exploring, not to mention an interesting little hook that I’m not going into for spoilers’ sake, but the truth is… but the film is just too padded, which is insane for how short it is. Most of the interesting ideas don’t even go anywhere either. Everything is left too open-ended, which makes me wonder if this project didn’t just start out as a short film, but maybe even as an attempt at a TV show pilot.

In a perfect world, a more clear-eyed director (and a more ruthless editor) would’ve seen the awesome short film that is buried within all that padding, but they didn’t, so… Jethica is left as nothing more than an ambitious stumble.