A collision at the intersection of tragedy and addiction can leave countless emotional fragments strewn across life’s road. Decisions already handicapped by the perpetual specter of compulsive demons become further clouded by the blinding pain of raw emotion brought on by an unthinkable happening. Eventually, the consequences of the initial collision produce decisions that create consequences of their own, until life becomes nothing more than a spiraling series of missteps taken in an attempt to correct each previous misstep. Borealis, a comedy-sprinkled drama from writer Jonas Chernick and director Sean Garrity, looks at the victim of one such collision, a man whose years-long addiction and years-old tragedy have put him in a position to make a series of increasingly poor choices that not only threaten his safety, but the safety of his 15-year-old daughter.

That man is Jonah (screenwriter Chernick), his addiction is gambling, and the tragedy that befell him was the death of his wife and mother to their only child, Aurora (Joey King). After years of emotionally-charged bad decisions, Jonah finds himself in deep debt to Tubby (Kevin Pollak). The bad news about Tubby is he works for a loan shark. The worse news is that Tubby and Jonah go back to when they were kids, so Tubby finds a soft spot when Jonah wants to borrow money to place a bet. One cry of “all-in” later Jonah is $100,000 in the red.

Jonah’s day gets worse. Not long after playing the biggest losing hand of his life, his daughter’s eye doctor tells him that her eyesight, which has already been riddled with disease, has grown so bad that she will be completely blind in weeks. Unable to break the devastating medical news to the daughter he already has a fractured relationship with, and unable to meet the demands of Tubby and his hired muscle Brick (Clé Bennett), Jonah drags his reluctant little girl on a road trip to see the Northern Lights—partly to give her a fleeting glimpse of something he considers to be indescribably beautiful, and partly to avoid the financially painful inevitability.

For a 95-minute drama with only three primary players and three supporting players, Borealis attempts to do a lot. This is a blessing for the film. It provides a wide open space for its considerable talent to put on display a litany of emotions and memories, plus it affords opportunities for the story to avoid cliché. But the film’s “don’t just swing for the fences, swing for the parking lot” approach is inevitably its curse, as the supersaturation of backstories, plot lines, ideas, and character motivations become more than the filmmakers can handle.

The core of the story is wonderful. This father and daughter—a fractured pair as a result of mom’s passing, yet also individually broken by addiction and disease—are thrust into a unique circumstance. They are being chased as a result of one’s flaw while simultaneously chasing the clock as a result of the other’s flaw. This alone is fertile ground for emotional exploration, and adding an interesting circumstance to the mother’s death makes it even more compelling.

But that circumstance—or rather, the ripple effect from it—is never examined below surface-level. Clearly Jonah (and most likely Aurora) has been affected by this loss, and surely the loss has influenced the survivors’ behavior and contributed to the distance between them, but it is only presented to either generate pity or take a shortcut to an emotional goal; it’s never presented as a real catalyst for dysfunctional behavior.

Everything else in the film suffers from this same problem. It isn’t a case of superficiality so much as it’s a case of underdevelopment. Things like Jonah’s gambling and Aurora’s vision loss—real meaty topics—are only heavy character traits and high-level cause-and-effect cases. Other things like the childhood relationship between Tubby and Jonah, and the adult relationship between Jonah and his current flame Kyla (Emily Hampshire), are presented like early concept musings, not fully developed relationships. What remains after all of these missed chances is another road picture, a film about getting from Point A to Point Z, with stops at B through Y along the way.

It’s frustrating because these ideas are terrific as individual notions and as a creative collective. They’re also perfectly enjoyable presented as they are, but they are ultimately unsatisfying.

There are, though, some very satisfying parts of this film, led by great performances. Chernick shines as the father with all the wrong answers and the weight of the world—a world he helped create, both as a father and a gambler—on his shoulders. King is marvelous as the teen who is too angry with her father to help mend their relationship and too proud to let her deteriorating eye condition stop her from doing what she wants. And Pollak delivers the goods as the hard-ass with the soft spot.

The humor sprinkled throughout is genuinely funny, even if it doesn’t quite fit. Instead of providing a respite from the drama, the humor actually undercuts it. It’s an example of one more thing the filmmakers attempt to stuff into a picture that is already jammed with so much concept. Still, funny is funny.

There’s a lot to admire about Borealis, but the film sags under the weight of its own ambition, loading up on many solid concepts but never developing any of them thoroughly enough to do the film a greater good. Still, Borealis is very much worth seeking out, particularly for the performances by Chernick, King, and Pollak.

This review was originally published on October 7, 2015 as part of our coverage of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

There’s an interesting effect the so-called “sex comedy” has on our collective response to racy material. As far as sex goes in film, we seem to react in exact proportion to the way the film’s characters treat the subject. If sex is taboo to the characters, we’re exhilarated to see it happen, if sex is boring for them, we’re desensitized and numb. A virgin anticipating their first time places sex on a pedestal we can’t wait to see them reach, and a person who uses sex for comfort won’t surprise us with their promiscuity.

This is where How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town goes especially wrong (except maybe also in having such a long title). It assumes that the audience has its own opinion on the audacity of the sexual escapades happening and will find humor in being shocked, but then gives us characters who express no such sentiment and thus direct our reactions to be just as tame as what we’re seeing. It’s an interesting conundrum and seems to get at the heart of comedy itself.

Jeremy Lalonde may not be trying to shock us with his film (which he also wrote), but he’s at least trying to make us laugh. Opening on that all too familiar scenario, teenagers in love about to get it on for the first time, he sets a more dramatic tone to start when the intimate act gets broken up by other teens at the party who instantly shame young Cassie by forcing her to leave the party in her underwear. Feeling rejected by her teen-love, Adam, and trying and failing to get home undetected, insult is added to injury when Cassie’s mother (Lauren Holly), a famous writer of young adult stories, insults Cassie’s sexuality and indecency. In rebellion, Cassie runs through the small town of Beavers Ridge with no top on, solidifying her place in their history.

Fast forward 12 years—or should I say “Flash Forward” in honor of Jewel Staite who plays grown Cassie? Sorry, couldn’t resist the reference—and 30-year-old Cassie is a respected sex-columnist with a book deal. News that her mother has passed away forces her to return to Beavers Ridge. Adam (Ennis Esmer) has grown up to be an estate lawyer who married Heather (Lauren Lee Smith), the snobby girl who broke up their sexual tryst years before. It’s Adam who breaks it to her that her mother has in fact left her nothing, which leaves her in a tough spot as she was depending on an inheritance to pay back her book advance, writers block having left her bone dry.

Things get interesting when Adam’s wife Heather discovers Adam can’t get her pregnant. This being her only reason for existing means she’s forced to look for viable semen elsewhere. Cassie runs into the old gang at her mother’s funeral and a sort of throw down of prudes versus sexuals occurs. As a sort of gauntlet, Cassie asks if they’ve participated in an orgy, this apparently being the peak of sexual freedom. None of them have, and she leaves the victor. It’s only later that Cassie reveals to her best friend Alice (Katharine Isabelle) that she is, in fact, a virgin. The orgy idea, however, has provided Heather with the perfect way to get her hands on someone else’s swimmers, and with her husband’s blessing. She asks Cassie to lead an orgy, and seeing a potentially interesting story in the entire scenario, Cassie agrees.

It’s at this point that things could get interesting, except that the film establishes very early in the film that pretty much all the participants recruited for this orgy do, in fact, hate each other. Adam and Heather’s marriage is shaky, Alice and her slimy real estate husband Bruce (Mark O’Brien) are separated, Chester (Jonas Chernick) the local record store owner hardly seems the type to be friends with any of these people and is clearly in love with his employee Polly (Tommie-Amber Pirie), and Cassie opts to direct them rather than participate. Awkwardness ensues, but the film misses its mark in what would make a more interesting exploration.

Each of the participants involved in the orgy have some sort of sexual issue, a result one imagines from growing up in a sexually repressed town. Except that their histories aren’t explored in any way and the mental blocks each faces are meant to be more funny character quirks than full-blown plot points. The biggest fault of this is in Cassie’s development, which should clearly explore why a person who’s made sex their life’s work would abstain. The film abuses her abominably by implying that it’s a residual love for her high school crush that has kept her back. For 12 years? There is serious psychological issues here.

The film’s ending only extends its naivete, and doesn’t do much in the way of empowering its characters, especially Cassie. If Lalonde had allowed his characters to mimic real people, it could have found some real humor. But when sex becomes the gimmick, and the characters take on the same old tropes when dealing with it, there’s nothing to laugh at. Unlike more successful indie sex comedies like last year’s The Overnight where sexual psychology fueled the events of the film and provoked thoughtfulness as well as laughs, How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town checks its psyche at the door and represses laughs as much as it represses true sexual experience.