A fatally overdosed mother called Jacey is unceremoniously bundled into a trunk at the start of this southern US-set drama; the uncredited actor who plays her should probably have a word with her agent, as the role is surely in contention for a world record as the least likely to boost your career. Jacey is just one of the drug casualties littering director Dan Kay’s underpowered film about the US’s super-strength opioid crisis, as her two bereaved daughters desperately tread water in the aftermath.
While 11-year-old Jessie (Jojo Regina) steps up with loving words in the face of tragedy, 15-year-old Spider (Mckenna Grace) has a practised indifference. All too accustomed to dealing with her mother’s addiction, her attention is on what happens now – notifying the authorities of the death would mean the sisters would be separated by the care system. So she steps up to run the household and fend off Jacey’s junkie boyfriend Reece (Dacre Montgomery), while she tries to find a solution.
Even setting aside its one glaring implausibility (the psychological trauma and logistics of hiding your mother’s putrefying corpse in a shed for several weeks), What We Hide is too unfocused. The film doesn’t invest enough in any of the various interlopers who pitch up on the girls’ porch – skeezy boyfriend, hovering social worker (Tamara Austin), solicitous local sheriff (Grey’s Anatomy’s Jesse Williams) – to generate much suspense or chewy character complications. Passing hints of southern gothic, or fairytale suspension of normality, don’t bed in; the film’s plain realism starts to give way to melodramatic lurches, such as Jessie’s climactic asthma attack.
Luckily, both leads are good value, with Regina both sentimental and gutsy as Jessie, contrasting effectively with the emo-ish Grace, a proxy mother whose hypocrisies and blunders betray that she is still fundamentally a child. Spider’s tentative romance with convenience-store clerk and amateur photographer Cody (Forrest Goodluck) is the one plot strand that threatens to emotionally spark, and supply a little wisdom about art transcending trauma. The girls’ sisterly rapport is undeniably touching, but film is a bit too facile to dig deep into the American soul.
• What We Hide is on digital platforms from 16 February.
