Pensive
It will be their last time together as a class before they scatter across the world with their different talents and ambitions, with all eyes on Rimas who been invited to play basketball professionally in America yet is uncomfortable with the attention it brings him, while druggie Žygis is most likely to never escape their town in Lithuania and disillusioned Marius looks at a bleak future, his father wanting him to work in insurance while his mother’s attention is elsewhere entirely.
An estate agent unable to sell an isolated rural property because of the bleak reputation it carries, the sculptor who lived there having lost his entire family in a fire, when Rimas’ arrangements for the graduation party fall through Marius makes a bid for late popularity with the suggestion that they relocate to the woods, where drinking and dancing ensue and the budding chef calls for fuel for his barbecue…
Its UK premiere at FrightFest at the Glasgow Film Festival, Pensive (Rupintojelis) is directed by Jonas Trukanas from a script co-written with Titas Laucius, taking its name from the form of wooden figurative sculpture found in Eastern Europe, a number of which stand gathered in the field near the farmhouse, heads bowed and all eyeless save for the single guardian who stands at the entrance the property and whose empty eyes watch the intruders and their desecration.
Starring Sarunas Rapolas Meliesius and Povilas Jatkevicius as Marius and his sole friend Vytas who lead the convoy of cars in the summer sun alongside Kipras Masidlauskas, Martynas Berulis, Gabija Bargailaite and Saule Rasimaite as their classmates Rimas, Žygis popular Brigita and outsider Saulé, they were told at their graduation to “be the hunter, not the prey,” but had not expected the advice to become so immediately relevant.
The sculptures representative of the family lost by Algis (Marius Repsys), chopped up and used as firewood despite the protests of Marius, having late second thoughts about the wisdom of suggesting the unoccupied property as the party venue, Pensive is not so much thoughtful as slow, taking too long to move past establishing the roster of characters and the situation to the results of their selfish act of wilful vandalism.
A standard slasher of wholesale murder in the dark in the house by the lake, there is little originality in the premise or the multiple executions, somewhat like a kid just out of school and full of hopes but with no clue of the real world, rough-hewn wood and artfully blood-spattered windows insufficient to hold interest until the final scenes which provide a sharp and unexpected twist to the knife but too late to justify the investment already made.
The Glasgow Film Festival has now concluded
