Rent The Place of No Words (2019)

Fantasy/drama dealing with terminal illness - The Place of No Words review by PD

This is one of those drama/fantasy things, the basic theme of which is a family guiding a young child through his father’s terminal illness.

The fantasy element comes from the “hero’s journey,” an odyssey on which the dying father accompanies the boy (in the boy’s imagination) to help him transition to the new world that won’t have his father in it. The film is rooted in reality largely because it’s a continuation of writer-director Mark Webber’s experiments with casting real families (principally his own) and friends in his work and letting those relationships inform the films, so here veteran actress Teresa Palmer is both real-life and film wife, whilst the child is his real-life son, Bodhi Palmer, who delivers a remarkable, truly guileless performance. The basic problem however is that that the fantasy and real-life worlds are not very well woven together, with the former being much more engaging than the latter, which is rather cloying and cumbersome by comparison. So, watchable enough but for me the construct doesn't quite come off.