The Tracey Fragments

This is a film that you will either love and call daring for its visually challenging style or loathe for its pretension. Sadly, I fall into the latter group. My daughter and I sat down to watch this and within no time at all, we were being driven to distraction by the deliberate use of segmented frames and screens.

Director Bruce McDonald is deliberately attempting to replicate the way we think, the way memory works, that is not in sequential order but in a scatter gun fashion - fragmented, chaotic, sporadic, exaggerated. For some, he may succeed but I personally could not bear the use of several different frames on screen at once - is a bit like looking at a very busy kaleidoscope and drove me to distraction.

Elliot Page (best known for his Oscar-nominated role in Juno) does a good job as the eponymous heroine Tracey Berkowitz but ultimately one wonders why we should bother to care for her or her situation because there is no real attempt to elicit any feeling for any of the characters and the story itself really does not pass muster.

Ultimately, this is all style over substance and the end result is a film that just won’t let you like it.