Shot in Ireland, so at least the landscapes look pretty, this cuckoo-bananas drama stars Matthew Modine – rocking a white mop of hair and a bushy brush of fake beard – an American film director called Steve who is facing the end of his life. Or maybe he is God himself, casting souls in some indie-budget nonsense about a film director named Steve who looks just like him – or a deluded mortal who thinks he’s God who is fantasising all this on his death bed, or all those things at once.
Like the concept of the Holy Trinity, this is not easy for mere mortals to comprehend, but it has to be said that this is a mostly annoying and only fitfully interesting film. To give The Martini Shot the barest minimum of dues, it at least has a few fine actors in the cast, like Modine himself, Derek Jacobi, John Cleese, Stuart Townsend and, weirdly, Morgana Robinson (so great as Pippa Middleton in The Windsors). They help ease the tedium of waiting for this waffly, “spiritual” self-indulgent nonsense to finish.
Here’s what seems to be happening. Facing the end of his life thanks to an unspecified terminal illness that should have shuffled him off his mortal coil 18 months ago, this Steve bobs around the coast meeting up with crew members (always complaining they need more kit) and actors who are officially dead (Jacobi and Townsend’s characters) – not that this means they still can’t be cast. Steve’s assistant Mary (Fiona Glascott) banters away with him like she’s in a romcom, constantly deflecting his declarations of love because she has some other unseen guy named Jack to go home to, and anyway she’s quite phlegmatic about the possibility that her entire world will go poof once Steve dies. Sometimes Steve calls halt to the action and everyone freezes, like NPCs in a video game, and he might do an edit to change his therapist’s outfit so she looks sexier, which surely rather makes one question Steve’s status as deity.
When you think about it, Canadian director Stephen Wallis has pulled off quite a feat in making a film that’s just sort of interesting enough to keep luring one to pay it attention only to suddenly pull all logical sense away. It’s like watching a magician messing up that trick of whipping away a tablecloth under a load of plates and glasses, resulting in an unholy mess. My idea of a purgatorial afterlife would be being forced to watch this again.
• On digital platforms from 2 March
