Children of the Pines
It’s a difficult decision for Riley Newman to return home from the refuge of college to see her parents, to give them one last chance to try and form a relationship, perhaps apologise and attempt to make amends for their persistent failures when she was a child, John’s drinking and Kathy’s choice to defend him rather than her daughter, the broken promises that she would throw him out or that they would escape and leave him behind.
A last pause before making her way up the snowy road through the trees, Riley stops off at the local diner not realising her high school boyfriend now works there and has in her absence become close with her family, even calling her father “dad,” and arriving home the greeting is awkward, her parents obviously keeping secrets from her and finally requesting that she not judge them as they tell of their wonderful new lives which they want her to be a part of.
Written and directed by Joshua Morgan, Children of the Pines is a film of controlling behaviour and suffocating circumstances, of abusive relationships and trading one form of addiction for another, Kathy and John (Danielle J Bowman and Richard Cohn-Lee) having been drawn into the Coweta Church of Wiccan Arts with impossible promises of healing through methods only disclosed to initiates, a code of silence which can only protect the abusers.
Into this comes Riley (Kelley Tappan), trepidatious yet with genuinely good intentions but thrown by her encounter with Gordon (Vas Provatakis) who has unhelpfully said he will be passing by the house after his shift to hang out with John, the sense that she has been lured home under false pretences, even replaced in their already conditional affections, reaching a crescendo when her parents decide it is time to let her in on the other changes in the family.
Shot in rural Oregon against snow-capped mountain peaks, Morgan has stretched his small budget with copious drone shots of landscapes as Riley undertakes her pilgrimage, thoughtful monologues reflecting on the passage of time performed in voiceover, but despite the unusual ideas and strong performances Children of the Pines doesn’t live up to its obvious ambition, the pacing as glacial as the weather outside as it progresses little further than people sitting in rooms talking to people standing in rooms shouting.
The cult which Kathy and John have joined run by the sinister Lorelei and Leon Duncan (Donna Rae Allen and David Raizor), with scenes scattered throughout the film seemingly at random the dots are too disparate to be connected other than in the broad sense that bad things are afoot which comes as no surprise, Kathy’s behaviour from the outset that of someone who has been programmed and conditioned, the characters and their inappropriate responses clearer than the underlying story which remains vague.
Children of the Pines will be available on digital download worldwide from Friday 18th October
