THE NOVICE
Cert 15 ★★ In cinemas now
It looks great and it sounds amazing but a weak script sinks sound designer Lauren Hadaway’s first feature as a writer-director.
Expanded from her short film (and you can really feel the padding here), this drama about an obsessive student rower invites comparisons with 2015’s treble Oscar-winner Whiplash.
As with Miles Teller’s quest to become his music college’s first-choice jazz drummer, Alex’s (Isabelle Fuhrman) burning ambition to make her university’s varsity team borders on self-harm.
Immersive sound design and hallucinatory visuals take us into Alex’s fevered mind as she punishes herself on her college’s rowing machines.
Fuhrman is excellent but it all becomes very repetitive. The film desperately misses an antagonist like JK Simmons’ music teacher or witty dialogue to puncture the tension.
For me, the world of rowing was a problem too. This littlewatched sport, as the film admits, is an endlessly mundane exercise with rowers locked into a dull, metronomic routine of “legs, body, arms”.
I understood what made Teller’s student want to become a jazz great. Rowing in a straight line, and this young woman’s unexplained need to do it quickly, weren’t quite so relatable.