“Two veteran Canadian filmmakers meet in the middle with Weirdos, which finds a useful balance between director Bruce McDonald’s ’80s indie-hipster sensibility and writer Daniel MacIvor’s penchant for warmer, fuzzier dramedy. Their slender but pleasing black-and-white narrative finds two adolescents road-tripping toward bittersweet self-discovery across rural Nova Scotia.
“Besties Kit and Alice are plotting something — each has fibbed by telling their oblivious parents they’re spending the night at the other’s house. What the 15-year-olds are actually up to is hitching from their small inland town to not-much-larger Sydney on Cape Breton Island, where Kit plans to move in with the rarely heard-from mother his father Dave divorced some years back. It’s not that his home-life status quo (or Alice’s) is bad, exactly; it’s just that he wants a change, and she wants an adventure.
“In this largely off-grid setting, the kitschier aspects of ’70s culture aren’t so conspicuous. There’s also considerable use of flavorful golden oldies on the soundtrack, with an emphasis on Canadian acts like Nick Gilder, Gordon Lightfoot, and Anne Murray. - Variety
Printer-friendly version
