SUCK IT UP – directed by Jordan Canning – SPOILERS ⁓

Garrett has been dead a year or so, and Ronnie (Grace Glowicki) and Faye (Erin Margurite Carter) are (ineptly) coping. Ronnie is Garrett’s younger sister and Garrett was her best friend Faye’s first lover. He died of testicular cancer, to which his family has a genetic predisposition. By all accounts, he dealt with his approaching death quite well, just not in a way that endeared him to others.

There is much discussion of Garrett, but there are no flashbacks showing him. Not even a photograph. (A picture on the cottage fridge might be him, but that is never confirmed.) But Garrett’s after-effects motivate everyone and everything in the story, which begins when Ronnie’s mom Dina (Nancy Kerr) calls Faye for help with Ronnie’s heavy drinking.

Faye decides that drastic action is needed. Next morning, she puts her friend (who is still sleeping off yesterday’s alcohol) in Garrett’s blue Mustang and heads for the family cottage at Invermere-on-the-Lake. (The starting point of the trip is never mentioned, but it takes several hours, and when Faye tells Ronnie she is applying for a job in Vancouver, Ronnie responds “That’s far.” So Ronnie likely lives near Kelowna.)

In Invermere, they run into Alex (Toby Marks), who runs a candy store and had a fling with Garrett the previous summer. (Ronnie knows this but Faye doesn’t.) Alex has a roommate named Granville (Dan Beirne) who, after many awkward attempts, develops a relationship with Faye, or at least thinks he does. Granville is diabetic, asthmatic, and something of a space buff. Other notable locals are Dale (Michael Rowe) who runs a mobile mud-wrestling operation that is surprisingly relevant to the story, and Shamus (Blake Gordey), the local weed merchant. (The film was made before marijuana was legalized.)

When she was younger, Faye had a stutter and she periodically repeats a nonsense rhyme to herself to prevent it from returning. Faye is genetically predisposed to skin cancer, and since Garrett’s death, she shuns the sun in an attempt to avoid melanoma. (She also refuses to swim in the lake for fear of getting swimmers’ itch.) Concerned about her friend’s newfound timidity, Ronnie tells her: “You wouldn’t recognize fun if it was sucking on your puffy nips.” Both Faye and Ronnie use sarcasm a lot, but Ronnie is often unintentionally poetic.

Faye’s trip to the cottage interrupted her job search, so she unwisely schedules a skype interview with Sarah Martin, the Dean of a (fictional) exclusive school in Vancouver. Ronnie and the gang didn’t know that, so they spike Faye’s lemonade with ecstasy half an hour before the call, and the conversation with Dean Martin does not go well.

While sorting Garrett’s things, Dina discovers that he left two notes, one for Faye and another for Ronnie. She delivers them to the cottage while Ronnie is out, along with a portion of Garrett’s ashes for Ronnie to scatter. Faye is afraid to open her note, so she opens Ronnie’s instead, and, as one might expect, this leads to conflict. The serendipitous arrival of Dale and his inflatable mud-wrestling raft provides Faye and Ronnie with an effective mechanism for catharsis.

After their impromptu wrestling bout, Faye and Ronnie trade Garrett stories, amending their memories of the deceased to include his (many) faults. Liberated from the man’s influence by an honest appraisal of him, they leave Invermere, and one gets the impression that vaguely Garrett-related relationships (e.g. Alex amd Granville) are banished from both their lives along with Garrett’s ghost. (Faye does put the painting Granville gave her in the car.) As they depart, Ronnie is in the driver’s seat.

From that position, in which she is clearly uncomfortable, Ronnie delivers a brief monologue. “Hey Garrett,” she says, “I know I’m not supposed to sit here, but, they way I see it, if you’re really up there, you can just make sure that I don’t crash and kill us. That totally works, right? And if you’re not, well, you’re not the boss of me, you butt-face. I can take care of myself.”

Ben Fox‘s music is both pervasive and unobtrusive, and combined with Jordan Canning‘s innovative use of light and shadow, makes these characters agreeable and familiar. One is quietly pulled into their conflicts.

Director Canning explained to Rob Patrick of Cinema Spartan how the film’s location was chosen. “The film was written for Invermere in a pretty cool way, because Julia [Hoff] is an American who lives in LA and has never been to the location. Grace and Erin used to go to Invermere as kids — not together, but their parents both had cottages. The cottage we actually shot in is Grace’s family’s cottage. Julia wrote the script for Invermere. Grace and Erin sent her a list of places in the community…Julia took them all in and created this world.”

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Miscellaneous Info

A list of the music from SUCK IT UP can be viewed on Tunefind. Three songs are by Alice and the Glass Lake (Alicia Lemke) from an album she created while she was being treated for cancer. After Lemke died, the final production on the album was done by her friend Kiesza and her guitarist Adam Agati. Distance (heard during the drive to the cottage) and Coals (heard while the two are washing off the mud in the lake) and are from the posthumous album “Chimaera“. Luminous (in the background during the film’s end sequence) is from The Evolution EP (2013)

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SUCK IT UP is available on DVD, and can be streamed on TUBI.

* Last Updated 1 year ago ago