Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Nora Tschirner, Rob Knighton, Kellie Shirley, Stirling Gallagher, Liberty Selby, Madeline Duggan, Eliza Harrison-Dine, Ellie Chidzey, Dimitrijs Burilov, Mark Kempner, Kylie Hutchinson, Jamie Chung, Ionut Paliev, Dizzy Maggs, Reuben Perdios, Steve Thomas, Clayton Thomson, Kay McLoughlin, Glenn Mccance, Brett Goldstein.

There is no such thing as a boring subject, just uninterested people, just as there is no such thing as a tedious town or village which covers itself in the dull and lacklustre, there are just people who don’t want to be there.

In the collectively written British film Everyone’s Going To Die, the element of not wanting to be in a place that feels cold, uninviting and wearisome is woven throughout and it is to the films great advantage that much is made of this. For in seeing things in the way they are, a greater level of understanding for the feeling of helplessness and the urge to run away from it all becomes all consuming, sometimes it just takes the right nudge or the correct angle to come to that conclusion.

The film really stands upon the interaction of the two relatively unknowns, at least in the U.K. of Nora Tschirner and Rob Knighton as Melanie and Ray. This partnership brought about through the chance meeting over the lack of 20 pence in a café verges on the most ordinary, the feeling of the comfortable in a world that to them both is slightly off centre. The fish out of water syndrome, the lack of empathy to the place they both find themselves in and the struggle to find a connection to the future is played out with odd familiarity, the ease of connection between the woman who ran away from her own country and the man who left the Kent town in anger and resentment is to be seen as linked in the way that only strangers can be, through their own disappointments and fading obscurity.

For both Nora Tschirner and Rob Knighton, Everyone’s Going To Die represents the start of deep fascination for their work, the sleek elegance of the film wrapped in a wonderfully warped and tremendous off kilter mundane, beige circumstances, more than highlights both actors ability to bring a touch of the exquisite to a story in which the commonplace can be seen as killing not only time but those that don’t belong there.

Everyone’s Going To Die is dark, bleak, pathos driven and utterly enjoyable, the spark of life between the lead actors bringing the screen alive, not with romance but true life and the feeling that sometimes you have to leave a place and never return to see the beauty, however small, that runs through its veins.

Ian D. Hall