No Stranger Than Love (2015)

The script wants desperately to be about the unfathomable nature of love. The best it can deliver is this: “Love is loving someone who is covered in snot.” It’s all quirked up, but goes nowhere.

It aims for the heart, but misses. It reaches for existential but never manages much more than “twee.”

Feels like it probably began life as a one-act play, set almost entirely in Lucy’s living room and with a small cast of characters. It has that feeling of a piece that needed a bit more workshopping to discern its purpose and, like a lot of independent cinema that feels like it has theatrical origins, never becomes convincingly cinematic.

No Stranger Than Love offers an accidental lesson: Attempts to write poetry ought to be preceded by attempts to read it and, preferably, understand it.

By the time the entire town discovers that Clint is trapped in a weird hole and Lucy has fallen for Chatwin’s Rydell White, No Stranger Than Love picks up some serious steam, balancing its bizarre tone with actual charm. Sadly, however, it’s too late to pull the production out of its own gaping void: The inability to treat its characters with respect.