DVD Review: Nina Forever (2015)

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By Keri O’Shea

if genre film has taught us anything (and I think you’ll agree, it has) then we know that death needn’t be the end for that whole boy-meets-girl thing. It’s happened for years on our screens in a variety of different ways, from Return of the Living Dead III through to the rather flawed Burying the Ex and onto the subtle joys of Life After Beth. (Oddly, off the top of my head I can’t think of any films where the male love interest comes back from the dead, with his old character intact, to revisit a female partner, but I digress). Point here is, the basic premise behind Nina Forever was already familiar to many viewers before directors Ben and Chris Blaine decided to put their own spin on the idea. Happily, the story they weave out of these elements is anything but tried-and-tested, and a curious, sometimes challenging film emerges.

ninaWe start with what appears to be a death scene: a young man lies, awkwardly sprawled and motionless, across a main road, having just fallen from his motorbike. Here’s the first surprise the film has to offer – he isn’t dead, but he really wanted to be. Rob (Cian Barry) has just attempted suicide in the wake of the death of his beloved girlfriend Nina, who herself died in a traffic accident. All he wanted to do was to join her; he fails, however, and eventually returns to his humdrum job at a local supermarket, where he has attracted the attention of co-worker and paramedic student Holly (Abigail Hardingham). Where most people would tiptoe around the bereaved, Holly is actively interested by what she sees as Rob’s brooding intensity and dedication to his love; she fantasises about what it would be like to fuck someone like that. Life does after all go on, Holly’s clumsy attentions are rewarded and before too long, romance blossoms for this somewhat damaged pair of people.

At first, Holly finds Rob just as intense, but also sweet and self-conscious, as she seems to have hoped. It all seems to be going well and, like most new couples, they can’t keep their hands off each other. Sadly for them, that’s where things start getting …less rosy. See, no sooner are Holly and Rob finally going at it, but the deceased Nina – bloodied, broken, but unmistakably she – re-appears, tearing out of their conjugal bed to look decidedly unimpressed with this new state of affairs. Fully aware of her condition, Nina is quick to play with semantics and pointedly reminds Rob and Holly that she will, for all time, have an unassailable position: never really an ex, never really gone either. Sex seems to be the catalyst – as well generating as an early relationship obstacle par excellence – but with Nina turning up to bleed all over the sheets every time the couple get close, can they work out how to stop it?

It’s possible that you could watch this film and just take it on face value, accepting that a jealous revenant rocks up every time her boyfriend and his new squeeze get together and that this causes some decidedly British ‘difficult moments’. However, I think you’d have to talk yourself out of appreciating many of the film’s more charming and interesting aspects to do this, because for all the sex and gore (and these are pretty abundant, to be fair) it’s very difficult not to see the film on a much more symbolic level, and as such to see it as a much more clever film. Symbolism is definitely in there from the get-go, from the first time the couple share a quiet moment together and wind up sharing a pomegranate (Greek myths and legends anyone?) right through to the film’s brilliant, subtle verbal exchanges, albeit exchanges which chiefly occur between the two women.

And this is something which strikes me about the film – it’s very female-dominated. Whatever Rob’s initial appeal to Holly, his frisson of notoriety dissipates as the story progresses; it turns out he’s not all that brooding or unattainable, not really, whereas Nina is a truly unknown quantity, a woman – dead or alive – with power over the situation and its key players. The battle of wills between her and Holly goes a hell of a lot further than straightforward feminine jealousy, too. Nina Forever has hit upon a novel way to illustrate some fundamental human anxieties, giving the idea of the spectre of the ex-partner a very literal, ghastly form, but also placing it at an intersection, using it equally to explore the weight of grief upon people and how they act as a result. Nina embodies a great deal, and her continued presence stands in for different things at different times, a task which O’Shaughnessy shows herself more than equal to. However, Abigail Hardingham deserves much credit for her performance here: Holly is naive, young, but what’s going on in her head belies her exterior, and she grows ever more interesting as she clearly comes to terms with the implications of her own inferiority issues. So, hey, add a coming-of-age aspect to the list of themes on offer.

A film which contains such a mass of different aspects is always going to struggle in places, and indeed the way in which Holly and Rob initially deal with the appearance of a twisted corpse in their bed is a little more accepting than you might expect, but then again, these sequences have perversely funny aspects to them, too. A sharp, ascerbic comedy runs through the film like a seam, coming to the surface is some unexpected places. Add to all this impressive aesthetics, high production values and, to top things off, a thought-provoking conclusion, and it’s fair to say that the positives far outweigh anything else here.

I started this review by saying that mixing boy-meets-girl with macabre elements is nothing new, and perhaps it isn’t. Thankfully, however, Nina Forever shows that when filmmakers challenge themselves to do something different, they can see this through in some style – and remind us that grisly content never needs to get in the way of a compelling narrative, even if the grisly content is an integral part of the film.

Nina Forever is released on February 22nd 2016.