"A fatally overdosed mother called Jacey is unceremoniously bundled into a trunk at the start of this southern US-set drama; the uncredited actor who plays her should probably have a word with her agent, as the role is surely in contention for a world record as the least likely to boost your career. Jacey is just one of the drug casualties littering director Dan Kay's underpowered film about the US's super-strength opioid crisis, as her two bereaved daughters desperately tread water in the aftermath."
"Even setting aside its one glaring implausibility (the psychological trauma and logistics of hiding your mother's putrefying corpse in a shed for several weeks), What We Hide is too unfocused. The film doesn't invest enough in any of the various interlopers who pitch up on the girls' porch skeezy boyfriend, hovering social worker (Tamara Austin), solicitous local sheriff (Grey's Anatomy's Jesse Williams) to generate much suspense or chewy character complications."
An overdosed mother named Jacey is bundled into a trunk, leaving two daughters amid the opioid crisis. Eleven-year-old Jessie offers loving support while fifteen-year-old Spider adopts practiced indifference and fears authorities will split them up. Spider runs the household, fends off Jacey's boyfriend Reece, and conceals the mother's corpse to avoid child services. The story strains plausibility with prolonged corpse concealment and remains unfocused, failing to develop interlopers like a skeezy boyfriend, a hovering social worker, and a solicitous sheriff into compelling threats. Hints of southern gothic and fairytale suspension never cohere, and realism slides into melodrama. Both leads deliver strong performances; Jessie is sentimental and gutsy, Spider an emo-ish, flawed proxy mother.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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