Our Happy Place
It was their second home, their retreat, their place of safety and sanctuary and peace, their cabin in the woods by Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino, two hours drive from the madness of Los Angeles, yet now it is a shell of broken memories, Paul unresponsive, breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank removed only to be spoon fed oatmeal and mashed banana by his devoted wife.
Her life upended, Raya is distracted and distraught, facing a Christmas effectively alone in a place which once echoed with laughter and conversation, now disturbed and displaced, waking each morning in the forest, barefoot in her nightclothes, a shovel beside her and a pit dug beneath, the pattern repeating and the grave dug deeper as she wakes from each nightmare, repeating events she has no memory or awareness of.
Written and directed by Paul Bickel in addition to a host of other production capacities, he also stars as the inert Paul trapped in Our Happy Place, a micro-budget horror of confusion and claustrophobia even in the wild outdoors, a charming, handsome, gregarious man in flashback now reduced to an object to be tended to in the back room yet a presence in the troubling fragments of dreams which haunt his wife.
The reason for his profound incapacity never divulged, Raya Miles is Raya, seeking answers and understanding of what is happening to her, horrified to see faces in her nightmares she recognises from missing persons posters at the local post office, her distant friend Amy (Blood Relatives’ Tracie Thoms) concerned at her increasingly erratic behaviour and absences, the film deliberately disjointed to emphasise the confusion.
Our Happy Place conveying a sense of not being in control, Raya as helpless as her husband, she begins to unravel as she peels back layers of wallpaper and loses track of the days and the seasons, and trying to ascertain if it is all in her imagination prompted by lack of sleep and her nocturnal wanderings she sets up cameras, providing disturbing evidence that there has been another presence in the house.
The emphasis on the creepiness and the occasional scares rather than progressing the plot, the film is slow and necessarily repetitive and when the answers tumble out there are few surprises and less logic, but carried by Miles, her frustration and distress genuinely felt, and Bickel as the menacing apparitions of Paul, a stranger rather than the man she loves, the performances surpass the limitations of the revelations.
Our Happy Place had its international premiere at the Raindance Film Festival
