Director/Screenplay – Josh Lawson, Producers – Jamie Hilton, Michael Pontin & Isabel Stanfield, Photography – Matt Toll, Music – Chiara Costanza, Visual Effects – Cumulus VFX (Supervisor – William Gammon), Makeup Effects – Lucy Woolfman, Production Design – Steven Jones-Evans. Production Company – See Pictures.
Teddy meets Leanne at a New Year’s party in Sydney when he kisses her by accident because she is wearing an identical dress to the woman he is on a date with. A year later, they are planning to get married. While visiting the nearby graveyard, they meet a mystery woman to whom Teddy laments that life is moving too fast and he never has time for anything except work. Teddy wakes up the morning after the honeymoon to discover it is now the first wedding anniversary and that Leanne is pregnant. Every few minutes, he skips another year ahead through time to the day of his next wedding anniversary. In that time, he sees his marriage to Leanne drift apart and they divorce, his best friend die of cancer and his daughter grow up.
Long Story Short was the second directorial outing for Josh Lawson who was otherwise worked as an actor in Australia since the 1990s. Lawson has made a couple of appearances in films I have written up, including playing George Lazenby in the fictional scenes in Becoming Bond (2017) and Kano in Mortal Kombat (2021). He can also be seen on screen here as the red-haired psychiatrist that Zahra Newman moves in with after leaving Rafe Spall. Lawson had previously directed and written the non-genre comedy The Little Death (2014).
The premise of someone skipping through their life one year every few minutes is an interesting and original one. It feels like it would have perfect for an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959-63). The only other work that I am aware of that dealt with such an idea was the Adam Sandler comedy Click (2006) where Sandler plays a husband who gains a remote control that allows him to skip through the boring bits of his life.
Rafe Spall and Zahra Newman on their wedding day
It took me a reasonable length of time to get into Long Story Short. It uses a Time Travel premise but in a very Light Fantasy way – the means are no more than a magically conferred wish. It is interesting to see the changes that occur each time Rafe Spall skips on one year – he trying to protect his marriage after it has drifted apart, not recognising his grown daughter, trying to stop his friend from being affected by cancer. Eventually by the end, it arrives with some modest affect and becomes quite likeable.
Rafe Spall, a British actor who has been doing some solid work in mostly dramatic parts in UK tv and film, expands his range into a comedy role. He proves positively manic in the part at times as though determined to carry the film by his madcap anguishing. Up against him by contrast, Zahra Newman remains detached and fails to match Spall in terms of energy or bringing much of the romantic spark that is supposed to be going on between the two of them. It’s a romance that feels like a one-sided equation. Indeed, in the few scenes Rafe Spall has with Dena Kaplan, she demonstrates far more vivacity and you wonder why the filmmakers didn’t cast her as the female lead instead.
