User Reviews

When a young widow rents a room to a mysterious veteran, their attraction sparks unforeseen circumstances.

As it is a Gravitas Ventures film I adopted my usual method for films distributed by them. They are frequently self financed or budget movies, often by unknown stars and sometimes first time directors, so quality isn't always what you'd hope.

However while the quality isn't there in this film it is a very watchable story and a heart warming one too. The film is carried really by Skyler Samuels who plays Lillian, and Cole Sibus who plays her brother Arrow. It's very predictable, sometimes a little slowly paced, with chunks of self pity that is so common in American films, and a hefty dose of melodrama.

Lillian takes in a lodger who upsets the applecart between her and her boyfriend. But I'll be very honest, I didn't get the whole thing. At the end we see the lodger in jail, with a letter from Lillian saying she loved him. (Which is fine because her boyfriend pointedly said "Goodbye Lillian." in the hospital but she smiled in return and I have no idea why he left her.

But quite why the lodger was in jail I had no idea either. It may have said so in the story but I could not be bothered to go back and find it. Perhaps my attention had drifted? The dialogue was sometimes difficult to hear, and sometimes just irritating or nonsensical. So I may have tuned out important bits.

Overall I still give it a 5 as Sibus and Samuels made it highly watchable.

This movie had potential. The acting isn't bad and the idea is solid. Unfortunately, I couldn't get past the quintessential premise that the lead's husband was somehow posthumously the subject of military punishment after being killed in combat. WTH??? For what? Getting killed without permission? Like a company, battalion or brigade commander is going to push through some kind of negative separation status for someone in their command who is already dead? The story that David told must have included Matt murdering women and children and burning villages on his way to getting shot to justify this kind of administrative response.

And the kicker is that, while someone with an "other than honorable" or worse discharge would be ineligible for certain veteran's benefits, it wouldn't affect their SGLI (life insurance) since the only qualification for that is that you died. So Lillian should still have received this payout.

Then David is somehow brought back into service and incarcerated for "lying" about the fact that he ignored orders to withdraw and chased an enemy combatant into a tunnel which led to his being wounded and friend killed. Maybe he was so full of guilt that he altered his story to include actually shooting Matt himself. This whole plot point is just such BS and because they made it the basis of the whole story . . . It ruined the movie for me. It would be like throwing in an intervention by aliens, Santa or some kind of magical coincidence.

So we have a waitress Lilian who is unhappy about the death of her husband because we not honorably discharged from the military thereby not getting any benefits from his death. However, she is superfine to be in a relationship with a loser. Enters David - ex military veteran and pure gold-class acting in being expressionless. He randomly drives to a bar, gets a job and meets Lilian in a supermarket and then rent a spare room in her house only to later confess that he was responsible for the death of her husband and his actions got him dishonorably discharged. At this point, my GERD resurfaced after 7 years and I decided to write this review fearing for my life.

Acting was horrendous all round, except for Cole as the brother of the waitress. veteran actors like Virginia Madsen & Chris Mulkey must have been in a filed-for-bankruptcy-situation to act in this meandering mess.

Absolute malarkey as Biden would say.