The Valley (2017)
Devastated by his daughter's suicide, an immigrant
entrepreneur working in high-tech seeks answers to his lingering
questions.
Director:
Saila KariatStars:
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
5 March 2017 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
The Valley See more »Filming Locations:
Silicon Valley, California, USACompany Credits
Production Co:
A
hammy and facile family drama in the TV-movie-of-the-week mode. Alyy
Khan plays Neal, a super-successful South Asian guy who runs a tech firm
in California’s Silicon Valley,
always taking meetings with top social media outfit “Facenote”. He has a
beautiful wife and two grownup daughters but he neglects them.
When he discovers that his shy daughter Maya (Agneeta Thacker) has
taken her own life while away at college, Neal makes it his anguished
business to go to the campus and hamfistedly investigate the causes –
boy trouble? exam trouble? – while never properly looking at his own
emotional coldness. Various possible red herrings are ambiguously
sketched out in flashback: a Zac Efron-ish boy got her drunk at a party.
Did he rape her? A narrative fudge means that this issue is never
really resolved. Finally, Neal comes to some sort of self-knowledge.
It is all pretty hackneyed, though I have to admit that Maya does
endure one very real-looking trauma: going to see her professor after
getting a mortifying D grade on her physics test. She did all the work,
she showed up for lectures, she just didn’t get it – and her grimly
unsympathetic teacher tells her that if she somehow gets 100% on the
next test, her overall grade could creep up to a horribly unimpressive
C. The sheer banality and awfulness of all that had the ring of truth.
The rest is cliche and solemn soap opera.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
0 comments:
Post a Comment