Three siblings are reunited after their father dies. As one of them seems to not want to stick around, the other two find ways of making her.
Written by Macarena García Lenzi, Martín Blousson, Julieta García Lenzi, and Valentín Javier Diment with the first two also serving as directors. The story here uses some elements of Misery, a bit of munchausen by proxy, a lot of Wizard of Oz, and honestly, too many cooks in the writing kitchen. The film has some good ideas, but the ideas that take over the majority of the run time are perhaps not the best ones. It’s a film with tons to say, even naming its 3 characters after the Bible, but it seems to get lost in how it says these things. It becomes unfortunately a bit of a bore after about 30 minutes of watching and the viewer loses interest completely not much longer after this. It’s a film that could have been brutal or could have really said something about family or even spirituality, but all that is remembered from it after the credits roll are the ill attempts are making their own Wizard of Oz within the film. It’s one of those films that has a ton of potential and gets lost in the proceedings, leading to a story and characters the viewer just won’t care about pretty early on.
Playing the mostly gloomy characters are Agustina Cerviño, Valeria Giorcelli, and Pablo Sigal. They all do decent work, but the story and character development they are saddled with limits their performances on many fronts. The film having the story and script it’s got leads to these three doing their best to give it life and bring it to an interesting form with their work. Does this work? Not fully. However, there are glimpses of great performances here, they are just lost in everything else going on.
The film’s cinematography by Nicolas Colledani looks calculated and knowing, the work done with the images by far exceeds that of the story and will make some want to watch the film. The visuals are what keep the attention, or grab it, here and there throughout the film. The work is gloomy, feels desolate within a mansion, and gives the film a new character almost, one that the viewer will want to spend more time with as opposed to the human ones at the center of the story.
Rock, Paper and Scissors feels like a film where too many minds came together to write the script and to direct it, feeling like a bit of a mush of a film that is dark and has interesting themes, but how these themes are explored is not all that interesting, giving the film a bit of a low care attitude which is something the story may not survive in the end. This film should have been fascinating given its themes of family, grieving, displaced care, and so much more, but it is ultimately an uninteresting mess.