That’s The Way Love Goes ( Guest Blogger THE LOVED ONES Review )

I’m just worried I won’t be able to do it justice, really.

The story follows young Brent Mitchell (played by the very pretty Xavier Samuel, who soon will no doubt set young hearts a-fluttering when he appears in Eclipse, the 3rd installment of the Twilight saga), who begins the film engaged in a disarmingly cute conversation with his father while driving down a mostly deserted country road. Swerving suddenly to avoid a ghostly figure which appears seemingly out of nowhere, however, Brent loses control of the car and crashes, tragically killing his father in the accident.

We flash forward a few months, and are shown the toll that his father’s death has taken on Brent and his family. His mother, unable to cope with her loss, shuts herself away and drowns her sorrows in whatever alcohol she can get her hands on. Brent’s own loneliness and despair is broken only by his girlfriend, Holly, played with just the right mix of compassion, intelligence and playfulness by Victoria Thaine. Add in a prom night on the eve of the school year’s end, a woman scorned, a hilarious and charming subplot involving two of Brent and Holly’s friends, Sac and Mia (Richard Wilson and Jessica McNamee), and a director who knows how to weave an engaging tale, and you have the ingredients for what is sure to become an instant cult horror date movie classic!

Sean Byrne directs this gruesome parable with a deft sureness that belies his relatively wet-behind-the-ears status as a feature film director. He knows when to show us that little bit too much, and when to let our imaginations do the work. He knows that no shot, no character and no plot point need be wasted. And most of all, the dude knows when and how frustratingly and tantalizingly long to hold a shot, building tension, teasing his audience with the promise of a release that, heart pounding, you almost start to think will never come … before letting it go so quickly that the recoil nearly snaps back and slaps you in the face like an elastic band.

And just when you think you’ve seen enough, that it’s gotten about as horrible as it can get, Sean Byrne gives you more. Plucking the strings of viewer, and character, endurance like a mad violinist, Byrne weaves his demented tale to the masterful beat of his own insane drum. And we love every breath-catching, scream-inducing moment of it.

Truth be told, however, this film really belongs to the astounding acting talents of Xavier Samuel and the film’s primary villain, the unlikely bad girl, Lola, played to the delightfully deranged hilt by the amazing Robin McLeavy. Samuel, for his part, really has very few lines. We live his doomed fate with him literally through his eyes…from the expression on his face, to the fiery glint in his soulful eyes, to the sounds of his terrified screams. Xavier Samuel owns the camera in this movie. Tight close-up after tight close-up, he brings us in to everything his character is experiencing, whether we want to see it, or not. He’s like a sort of beautiful trainwreck that way; we can’t stand to see what he’s showing us, but we can’t bring ourselves to look away, either.

And if Samuel owns the camera – the eyes – of this film, its heart and soul (or the lack thereof) belong to Robin McLeavy. From her first awkward moments of screen time, there is just something arresting about McLeavy’s Lola. Just as Lola does with Brent, McLeavy patiently waits until she has the audience right where she wants them, before she releases the full extent of her unabashed power, in a tour de force performance that can only be described as the most successfully disturbing incarnation since Annie Wilkes hobbled Paul Sheldon into believing that she was his Number One Fan. McLeavy is unashamed and unapologetic in her portrayal of Lola; each moment she is on screen, Lola shows herself to be even crazier than the last, to the point where she fairly skips through the fields of lunacy, giggling maniacally to herself as her demented internal world takes her over completely.

The Loved ones is a slick, perfectly-woven-together and sickening story that will take you to the edges of your own sanity, and yet, when all is said and done, it will leave you breathless and begging for more.