Natalie Bailey (Retrograde, The Thick of It) and Lou Sanz (The PM’s Daughter) present cinema goers with a sardonic, dysfunctional, contemporary Aussie family. Starring Jackie Van Beek (What We Do in the Shadows), Josephine Blazier (True History of the Kelly Gang), Jeremy Lindsay Taylor (The Dry) and Hannah Diviney (Latecomers), as The Lipsick’s. Audrey is a relentless dark comedy that tackles contemporary problems head on, with gallows humour and pointed sarcasm.
Titular character Audrey, convincingly portrayed by Blazier, is the worst. The shittiest kid a parent could have the misfortune to have. A demon narcissist late teen who rules the household through manipulative temper tantrums and beating eye lashes. If you took the worst behavioural traits of the Tik Tok generation, Gen Z entitlement and shoved it in a blender full of strawberry sherbet and bikini bottoms, you’d wind up with Audrey.
Which is why, once Audrey’s misadventure sees her in a coma, the future starts to look pretty good for Ronnie (Van Beek) and Cormac (Lindsay Taylor). That’s the recurring gag through this flick, ‘Life’s great when she’s almost dead’. But it works really well.
Look elsewhere for high brow, pretentious storytelling. The film opens with Cormac flaccidly trying to masturbate using a vibrating vagina and Audrey walks in on him. To everyone’s horror. This sets the bar for what’s coming. But it works really well. The visual gags, the situation comedy and scripted zingers mostly all land with cracker-jack timing. The archetypes are relatable and instantly recognisable. Everyone in this country knows people like this.
Cormac’s sexuality is repressed by years of a sexless marriage. Ronnie is trying to live life vicariously through Audrey after her own acting career fizzled and died moments before the children came along. Norah (Diviney), blessed with cerebral palsy, is permanent second fiddle to Audrey’s able bodied beauty. Though Norah is putting up with none of Audrey’s nonsense. Then there’s Audrey, lynch pin for the family angst and loathing.
But as Audrey sleeps and each misguided family member is free to explore their needs in the worst possible way, one can’t help but feel happy for them. Van Beek does a lot of heavy lifting as Ronnie but the real warmth comes from Hannah Diviney as Nora. Just when they come in to their own, Audrey wakes up and it all goes to shit.
Things get a little meta in the third act, threatening to unravel a little bit, but it’s a short lived and poignant sequence.
Keep a keen eye out for a who’s who of recognisable past and present Aussie TV personalities.
Audrey is screening at Somerville UWA on December 14th and 15th, as part of the The Lottery West Film Festival 2024. It’s a good laugh and well worth the price of admission. A cringing shake of the head at how diabolical one irredeemable family can become while seeking to find themselves. 7/10 jugs of herbicide.
