Dear David

Directed by John McPhail, Dear David follows a cartoonist (Augustus Prew’s Adam Ellis) as he finds himself pursued by a ghostly figure named David. Filmmaker McPhail does a fairly strong job of initially drawing the viewer into the increasingly tedious proceedings, as Dear David kicks off with a watchable opening stretch that benefits from its familiar-yet-workable premise and charming performances – which generally proves effective at allaying the movie’s often distractingly low-rent feel. It’s rather disheartening, then, to discover that Dear David progresses into a wheel-spinning midsection with few compelling attributes, as McPhail places an unreasonable emphasis on the central character’s tiresome hallucinatory encounters with the title apparition – with the far-from-enthralling bent of such interludes compounded by Adam’s hopelessly underwhelming and uninvolving investigation into David’s tragic past. And while the movie admittedly does contain a small handful of agreeable elements, with Justin Long’s amusing turn as Adam’s boss an obvious highlight, Dear David builds towards a larger-than-life final stretch that couldn’t possibly be less satisfying and more anticlimactic – with the end result a misfire that could only have worked as a 15 minute short.

*1/2 out of ****