Directed By: Mark Smoot, Andy Irvine
Starring: Charlie Heaton, Rosa Salazar, Catherine Keener, Jefferson White
Blame, grief, and guilt. This is “No Future” in three words.
One sad, melancholic, and totally pessimistic and dark movie about the life of drug addicts, who fight to get their life back and fail. Like so many addict cases: even when they see some light on the end of the tunnel it’s just an illusion- there is no way to come back from the point of no return.
But, this story is just a bit different. This one is about how human factors can be so destructive in somebody’s fight to get their life back. It is not enough to just be strong inside, you must be strong enough to reject all the attacks from the outside too. How the grief for a lost son can be so powerful and selfish, so much so that it’s able to destroy somebody else’s life that could maybe have been saved.
Chris and Will are longtime friends. They played in a band together and unfortunately got into dope together. They’ve been going through rough times, fighting with addiction. Will was mentally stronger and managed to somehow stay sober for a period. That was not the case with Chris. One night, Chris comes back to his old friend with the proposal to get the band back together. Will rejects knowing that the band will mean the end of his “clean” life. The same night Chris dies of an overdose. Will’s feeling of guilt for the tragic accident is overwhelming but he stays silent in front of everybody, including Chris’s mother. When she learns about where her son was on the night before his death, she puts even more pressure on the former addict who is lucky to be alive. That was a grave mistake. In such a selfish way, she’ll sacrifice another life just because she couldn’t stand her own responsibility in the tragic loss.
No doubt that the message of the movie is universal. In this case, this is drug addiction, but in real life it could be any trouble that life could bring to a person. That’s the egotism of a hurt mind speaking: if I’m going, everybody should go, when I’m drowning, I’ll take everybody else around with me down to the bottom of the ocean.
The movie is not expensive and is a very simple production. There is barely any cinematography to look at in this project, simply because anything other than the presentation of a strong, real life drama is absolutely irrelevant for “No Future”. Acting is just OK. More intense acting moments are missing on several occasions. The chance for deeper artistic expression is lost in numerous parts of the movie.
