Griff The Invisible

Synopsis: Griff (Ryan Kwanten) is an office worker by day and superhero by night. Well, the first part is true at least. Then he meets Melody (Maeve Dermody), an equally eccentric young lady. Is she his soul mate?

Griff The Invisible is most likely to appeal to people belonging to the same demographic as its titular hero – Gen Y, white collar daydreamers schlepping through the daily grind of office life. As a dysfunctional romance, it is a sweeter version of last year’s The Loved Ones, a film that arrived similarly critically praised and riding on the back of festival circuit success. Whether it will have the same brief life span commercially as that film or whether it will find an appreciative niche audience is anyone’s guess.

Writer-director (and elsewhere, actor) Leon Ford’s debut feature is a film that tends to rise and fall repeatedly rather than have a single unifying energy. For the first 30 mins or so it appears to be a kind of low-fi variation on Kick Ass (2010). Once Melody and Griff get together and the fledgling romance ignites it becomes much more engaging. Frankly, I found Melody with her quasi-scientific ideas a more interesting character than Griff’s action-figure fixated emotional retard but the two actors carry off Ford’s see-sawing script beautifully. One does wish at times that the latter was a little more subtle in tone, there being over much explication, particularly in the latter stages when the core idea comes to fruition. The script has been praised for its originality, which is perhaps an overly enthusiastic assessment as super-heroes are hardly unusual in these days and times and the general spirit of whimsicality is much beloved by indie film-makers around the world. Yet whilst being no Michel Gondry, Ford realizes it well on what was no doubt a curtailed budget.

In 2003 Tony McNamara’s oddball romance, The Rage In Placid Lake clicked with audiences. Dermody and Kwanten don’t have the cute factor of Rose Byrne and Ben Lee but hopefully there’s enough time before Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler arrive to suck up the date movie dollars for at least some of those CBD schleppers to empathise with Griff The Invisible for a while.

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