Drift - B-
By Kage Alan

Ryan (Reggie Lee, “Black Hole”) is an Asian Canadian screenwriter living illegally in LA with his boyfriend Joel (Greyson Dayne). The closer they get to their three year anniversary, the more restless Ryan becomes and withdraws into his own head. He can’t help but wonder if they are really a decent match for each other, especially since he and Joel have very different taste in movies, hobbies and don’t really understand each other. Actually, Ryan feels that Joel doesn’t really know him and isn’t sure he (Joel) is really interested in getting to know the side that Ryan wants to share. Everything is compounded when they meet Leo (Jonathon Roessler) one evening at a party.

Leo loves horror movies, is a novelist, shares Ryan’s fascination with serial killers as well as the desire to find a soul mate. The connection between them is so strong that Ryan decides to end his relationship with Joel and see if what he feels is truly what will make him happy. This is where “Drift” begins to find its inspiration because three possibilities are presented from the moment Ryan leaves. Without giving each of the directions and plot variations away, suffice to say that each stays true to the characters as they have already been defined and doesn’t present any shocking revelations that we couldn’t have seen coming if we’d actually sat down and thought about it. The characters’ pasts are unveiled and we are given a greater understanding of their motivations, where they’ve come from and how they’ve gotten to where they are.

The actors constantly struggle to look and seem natural in their actions, only the script holds them back with dialogue that goes from sounding too much like a conversation in one’s head to truly atrocious. The final version of the story is probably the strongest, only the ending is quite possibly the weakest. Still, Quentin Lee manages to hit on a part of ourselves that while sounding odd coming out of the characters’ mouths, makes sense in our own head. The DVD contains an embarrassingly shot 19-minute interview with the director.