Sarah (Lynsey Crawford) is hoping to reconcile with her ex-girlfriend Claire (Carol Renfrew), but runs into a roadblock when Claire admits that she has moved on. Claire is now with Stacy. And Stacy is a blow-up doll.
Where Christopher Purnell’s Killing Stacy is most successful is in the dry way it handles the absurdity of Claire and the inanimate Stacy as a loving couple. It’s not played as wacky or weird; Stacy seems odd only to Sarah, and it’s hard to tell whether she’s upset because Stacy is a blow-up doll, or that she’s Sarah’s replacement. The truth is a bit of both, I’d think.
Where the film stumbles is that it doesn’t quite go far enough with the weirdness of its central concept to justify even lasting as short as it does. Once the main joke lands, you keep waiting for something to happen, and very little does. It’s odd to think of a film that is just over ten minutes long being too long, but here it is. It lingers too much.
I do get the creative choice to let it breathe, however. The quiet expanse of the narrative allows the absurdity to be that much more subversive; you keep waiting, like Sarah, for it all to be a joke but it never is, at least not to Claire. The result for me, however, was I kept waiting for the film to push its ideas further.
Overall, it’s a fun concept, but one I wouldn’t have minded being executed in either a more efficient fashion, or at least taken to an even stranger extreme. Something to elevate it beyond the single note that it carries once Stacy is revealed (though the ending does try).
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