Wish You Were Here

Overview

Babe. I have something to tell you. These words strike the fear of God in your heart. It's a phrase that leads to downing a bottle (or two) of wine, running red lights, calling friends to babble, faking a sickie so you can curl up under the doona and cry all day. But you wouldn't expect it to put lives at risk, to end up in hospital, to involve the federal police and the government or other such escalations.

In Wish You Were Here, expectant couple Dave (Joel Edgerton) and Alice (Felicity Price) decide to go on holiday to a remote coastal village in southern Cambodia. They intend to suck the last remaining marrow of their youth while they still can, along with another couple, Alice's younger sister Steph (Teresa Palmer) and her new boyfriend, Jeremy (Antony Starr).

This quartet of sun-kissed, lithe-limbed and wealthy Sydneysiders spend their first blissful days in a heady exotic montage: racing scooters along the highway, gormandising snakes on skewers, handling harmless tarantulas and lying on the beach musing on life's possibilities before embarking on a drug-fuelled hedonistic frenzy. In the course of this crazy night, one of them goes missing for reasons that will shake their lives to the core.

The performances were so real that I was filled with anxiety for the characters and I missed them once the film concluded. This is no surprise since the director, Kieran Darcy-Smith, and his lead actress, co-writer and wife Felicity Price lived and breathed the film for several years — even discussing it in the shower together. Of the film concept, born from a true events within her social circle, Felicity says, "We did this so people walk out thinking, 'My god, this could be you or I.'"

So next time you hear that phrase, brace yourself harder than before.