Suck It Up is a tale of loss, friendship

Suck It Up is a movie about damaged people, and the way they manage to damage others. Ronnie (Grace Glowicki) has just lost her brother, Garrett, and compensates by turning to alcohol and promiscuous behaviour — although, as she admits, she was no saint even when he was alive.

Faye (Erin Carter) also lost Garrett, twice. They were a couple until about a year earlier, when he realized he was terminally ill, and dumped her. Now she and Ronnie maintain an uneasy relationship, dancing around the topic of death and stepping on each other’s toes.

There’s much to be mined from this vein of friendship and loss, but Canadian director Jordan Canning backs into the story, leaving us grasping for clues to things that should be obvious.

True, family and friends seldom spout neat parcels of backstory, and one should be wary of any line of dialogue that begins: “Now, as we both know ...” But the screenplay by Julia Hoff seems to be trying to keep things deliberately oblique.

Then again, if you’re patient, all your questions will be answered, from the mysterious rhyme that Faye repeats when she’s stressed out, to the enigmatic Alex (Toby Marks) who runs a candy store in the mountain village of Invermere, B.C., where Faye takes Ronnie to dry out. (Undeterred, Ronnie immediately goes in search of more alcohol, and some weed.)

The locals of Invermere also include Dan Beirne as the oddball Granville, Alex’s roommate, who prefers to be called Granny, and whose obsessive love of outer space suggests he might actually hail from there.

The screenplay sets him up as a rather transparent entity, before throwing in a bizarre personal choice. Or maybe not that bizarre. Maybe we just haven’t figured out his particular type of damage and how it manifests. Everybody has at least one.