THE SHOW (2020)

 

A man's search for a stolen artifact leads him to the haunted town filled with Voodoo gangsters, masked adventurers, Depression-era private eyes, and violent chiaroscuro women.

Alan Moore is known, among other things, as the writer of many comics such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, Prometheus, Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, and The Swamp Thing. The Show is based on the works of Alan Moore, specifically the short film series Show Pieces that Moore worked on with Mitch Jenkins (who has also returned to direct this piece). With returning characters and continuations of the pre-existing series history, if Show Pieces is not something you are familiar with, you are in for an unusual experience.

The Show isn't completely inaccessible without knowledge of the world ahead of viewing, but it is certainly an advantage. While the piece spends most of its runtime with exposition and heavy-handed monologue, the world is full of weird and wonderful characters; all with their own peculiar and wonderful powers and abilities, creating an overload of information to take in with little disclosure on how relevant or necessary that knowledge is to the narrative of the film.

With so much information needed for the convoluted plot and a large amount of misdirection and red herrings, The Show is awkwardly artistic and leads the audience down a rabbit hole of unrelenting nonsense. Lacking focus, the film has very little in terms of a narrative direction, simply leading its protagonists passively through a series of experiences and introductions where more information is fed to them until the final reveal. There is a certain level of charm, and the creativity is undeniable, but the convoluted plot will give the audience a hard time keeping up, and the rapid introduction and discarding of characters will provide the audience nothing to hook into or care about. Riding the line between absurd nonsense and intellectual dissonance, the deep line-up of characters are unfortunately stuck with nothing significant to do.

In a mysterious world of eccentricities, outrageousness, and fantastical personalities, our lead never manages to hold enough charisma to keep the interest of the audience. Motives remain unknown, the lines between reality and fiction intertwine, and Dennis the Menace is running around with as much control as a plastic bag on the set of American Beauty; simply along for the ride. While it lacks focus, pacing, and charisma, the peculiarities and obscenities are reminiscent of the unfiltered mind of a child, with the ideology that all ideas are good ideas. The Show is so far from predictable that it still keeps the audience in their seats, if for no other reason than to see how weird this world can be. 

The Show is in cinemas from December 16, 2021