Review Fix 2012 Tribeca Film Festival Coverage: Transmission Review: All for Dad

Posted by on 4/19/12 • Categorized as Movies

Zak Hilditch crafts a memorable apocalypse short in “Transmission”

With a name like “Transmission” and a decayed world encompassing anything and everything on-screen, you’d naturally expect zombies, right?

Not exactly.

While there isn’t a single one over the 13 minutes of this film, the powerful performances of Angourie Rice and Wayne S. Davies tell a story with much more depth than any flesh-eating ghoul can deliver.

While it’s ironically more “Kramer vs. Kramer” than “Mad Max,” by the time the credits roll, “Transmission” doesn’t feel like a lost cause. Instead, you smirk at its message. You get it. It hits the right spots at all the right times and makes the case that it had strong enough legs to last far longer.

With the world on the brink of destruction, Rice’s character is focused on other things. She’s a kid. Things like the beach, tomfoolery and starfish are important to her. But Dad (Davies) is desperate to prepare his daughter for the worst. Things like fresh water and gas for the car outweigh the frivolous nonsense his daughter is constantly yammering on about. He knows the world is changing and if his daughter isn’t ready for it, it could devour her and him. Brash, determined on his families’ survival and tough, yet loving, Davies is amply solid here and like Rice, make it easy to want to see more of them in the future.

This relationship is what powers the film. In a beautiful way, its simplicity, chilling score and soft, yet surreal shooting tell the story all by itself. Catchy and economical, it wastes little time getting to the plot and although it’s more emotional than you’d expect, there’s plenty of action as well. This combination, in this dose, has little nothing to do with luck- regardless of what Rice and the film’s tagline try to drill into your head.

Patrick Hickey Jr.

Patrick Hickey Jr. is the Founder, Editor-in-Chief, Master Jedi and Grand Pooh-bah of ReviewFix.com. He is currently a Journalism and English Professor at Kingsborough Community College and a Weekend News Editor at NBC Local Integrated Media. He also teaches Multimedia Journalism at Brooklyn College and has had articles and photos published in The New York Times, The New York Daily News and The Syracuse Post Standard. Love him. Read him.

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