Skip to main content
film review

Cory Monteith in All the Wrong Reasons.

New Brunswick filmmaker Gia Milani has shown herself in the past to be a deft director of actors, and that talent almost enables her to clear the various hurdles and complications she sets for herself in the 20-something ensemble drama All the Wrong Reasons.

But those contrivances ultimately prevail. Set in a big-box store, the story concerns James, an ambitious, likeably bland manager (played by the late Cory Monteith) and his strained relations with Kate, his intimacy-averse, PTSD-suffering wife (Karine Vanasse). She observes the world from the safely detached vantage of the store's closed-circuit surveillance system, but tentatively returns to the world of the flesh when confronted with a sensitive Irish firefighter, Simon (Kevin Zegers), who's dealing with his own form of trauma.

And with Nicole (Emily Hampshire), a desperately struggling, sexually tactical single-mother cashier, you're left with an awful lot of explosive emotional material packed into one little movie. The result teeters uncomfortably between dead-end-job slacker comedy and high soap, but it shows enough potential to bode well for Milani's future.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe