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Fourteen Movie Review

Fourteen is a 2020 independent drama film directed by Dan Sallitt and starring Tallie Medel and Norma Kuhling. It’s not that great of a movie.

It follows a mentally ill woman’s decline over the course of a decade as seen through her longtime best friend’s eyes. It’s all about this once great friendship that dissolves through the years. I had found that premise excellent before seeing the film, but execution matters most, and here it’s very weak and quite cheap.

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I am all for indie movies as I am a strong proponent that budget doesn’t matter in filmmaking. However, even I have to admit that here the cheapness was shown multiple times. The editing is so choppy and so unfulfilling that I quickly got frustrated with it. It’s supposed to be about a very long span of years, but in actuality I never got that time has passed as the editing is so bad.

Also, the direction and cinematography are poor. Sallitt has a terrible tendency to film in a very stagey, very unappealing manner and to frame the action on screen in such a way that it felt limited and once again cheap. The whole movie felt too unfinished, which is unfortunate as there was a lot of good to be had here.

Fourteen is very well acted. Kuhling and Medel are far from household names, but their performances are the only part of the film that felt genuinely professional and strong. They both killed it in their respective roles and I actually really liked the characters as well. Their development was good and their dynamic was very well established, thus some moments between the two were touching for sure.

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But all the other characters are very poor as the men are barely developed at all. The movie is all about not showing the big changes in their life, but just their conversations as the aftermath, and that does sound interesting, but it wasn’t executed properly, so I wasn’t fully invested. But the dialogue is excellent, that’s for sure, as I found their discussions and fallout very interesting to follow.

Fourteen is an indie movie that shows its very small budget too often unfortunately. While the characterization is good, the dialogue is strong and the main actresses are quite effective in their roles, the editing is choppy, the direction is wobbly and the film fails to execute its intriguing premise properly, resulting in a big disappointment.

My Rating – 3