The Bestowal Review

The Bestowal is a 2018 feature film written and directed by Andrew de Burgh.

A philosophical slow burn that tackles a ton of high concept ideas, The Bestowal is only held back by deeper visual depth.

For starters this is a film that is surely unlike anything you’ve probably ever sat down to. There is what we would call a slow burn film and then there is something even more stripped back, the conversation film as it could be called. Think of My Dinner with Andre or the Before series of films.

While these movies might not cater to everyone, they are still fascinating examinations of the simple thing we do all the time, which is just talking.

What we have in this case is a conversation that spans existence as a whole, multiple dimensions, death, suicide, etc. They are all presented well and with a lot of thought put into the crafting of the exchange.

There are a few things that seem to hold the piece back though, the first being visuals. While the scenes themselves all look really solid, the concepts discussed are so large that there are many moments you will want to be let out from the confined space to explore all of what that means.

The other place is in the way the two leads reflect off of one another. They may have an engaging screen presence but the tone of voice never changes much. The cadence can almost become too much of a single note. Maybe what was needed was some deeper conflict to really amp up the proceedings would have helped to break up the philosophical conversing. We get more emotionality by the end of the piece but something a little sooner, particularly in the second act, was needed.

There are also a few moments of story contradictions that do arise as well. The biggest one noticed here was the second exchange where Steven recounts his life after the initial meeting. Death or Zara acts surprised by the moments told to her but in the last talk she mentioned knowing all things so it at times seemed like perhaps it wasn’t as necessary to do except for filling the audience in for exposition.

These moments sound grand and sweeping but yet so many of them happen off screen it could be easy to feel slighted by not seeing any visuals of the amazing life experiences as they are recounted.

The Bestowal is filled with great, earned dialogue, and two interesting leads. It is only missing a little more challenge from the two characters between one another in moments, or some small escapes from the conversations they have. Certainly, though this is an amazing showcase for the amount of dialogue crafting that can be done in the more than capable hands of de Burgh and his entire team.

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Cheers!

Daniel Hess

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