Alyce (2011)

If you wanna see a dark drama this year, pick up a copy of Jay Lee's Alyce, just released here in Sweden by Njuta Films. Like my dear friend Cinezilla once wrote, if I knew that this movie was directed by the same director as Zombies Stripper I probably wouldn't have given it a chance. Not that Zombie Strippers was that bad, it's charming tongue-in-cheek zombie movie with lots of boobs. But that's about it, nothing more. And often that's not enough for me. I need something extra, some extra layer. Depth, as some pretentious people say. Alyce has all of this and it's a surprising departure from Zombie Strippers, and that's all I need to gain faith in a filmmaker.

A brilliant Jade Dornfeld is Alyce, a office worker who's best friend Carroll (Tamara Feldman) is a egocentric bitch - but not really that. She obviously care for Alyce, somehow, deep inside. After a terrible evening out clubbing Carroll is dumped by her boyfriend and they goes home to Alyce, or more correct: up on Alyce roof to escape reality for a moment. An accident happens and Carroll falls of the roof! Alyce, in her drunken depressed state don't know what she should do and locks herself in her apartment. Later a police officer knocks on the door and Alyce decides to lie and say that Carroll probably took suicide... and adds a story around that - until she understands that Carroll isn't dead, just very wounded. The guilt of lying and afraid of being caught in her lies drives her slowly into madness...

I wouldn't call Alyce for a horror movie, except it's slightly connected to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, but that's something I won't analyze. Read Cinezilla's review for example in that case. It's instead a very fine mix between a drama and a very dark comedy and it's pure joy to see Alyce go deeper into the shit, and also very painful. Her drug addiction gets worse and worse and her friends alienate her. Alyce is instead more bitter because Carroll treated her so badly, which is even more painful because Alyce is in love with her.

When the use of drugs escalate, the madness also gets more intense. She gets stuck in front of the TV, who shows how fucked up the world is and soon she decides to do something about it. Deleting those that treated her wrong, in very violent ways.

Alyce is a tour-de-force for Jade Dornfeld, who lives every scene like I've seen very few do before. She's both extremely funny and disturbing at the same time and manages to pull of a fine dramatic performance in the middle of it. The supporting cast is great to, and it's always a pleasure seeing character actor veteran Tracey Walter show up as Alyce's annoying landlord. Another fine return is James Duval, who once seemed to be destined to be a big star, but has kept a low profile in tons and tons of indie movies. He's still extremely active (just check his IMDB filmography) and I hope we will see him in bigger movies and smaller well-distributed movies like this.

Alyce might not be a typical Ninja Dixon movie, but it's still a fine movie and you should check it out. The Njuta Film's DVD looks wonderful, and for you others I'm sure it's available on DVDs in your country to!