Almost Always

A young guy pines for a girl but is unable to tell her how he feels before tragedy strikes.

Andrew (Hakim) is in love with Mia (Ooi). They’ve been best friends for a while now and they seem to hang out with each other exclusively on their down-time. Of course, Mia is blind to how Andrew really feels and just takes the relationship for granted, instinctively and permanently placing him in the friendship category of her life without ever questioning why they spend so much time together. Theirs is a story that spans time immemorial and is one which is unlikely to change anytime soon.

So, in their young, foolish, and juvenile way, the two of them hang out, have fun, take up hobbies, and spend time shooting the breeze together, all while Andrew keeps his heartfelt secret locked up inside himself and Mia waxes lyrical about the latest in a long line of boys that she’s been seeing, now finally thinking she’s caught ‘the one’. Andrew’s sister, Aeryn (Wong), can’t keep her nose out of his business and tries hard to force him into revealing his true feelings to Mia, very nearly succeeding as he gets himself ready and bigs himself up to actually do it. However, on the day that he decides to come out and tell the truth, Mia never shows, and the opportunity is missed, never to be repeated, as tragedy breaks the two apart forever.

In Almost Always, we’re invited to look upon this age-old story as it’s regurgitated for the bazillionth time, but this time transposed to Kuala Lumpur and played by an amalgam of East Asian students. Writer/director, Sanjeev Nair takes the helm for this telling of the story, using his own experiences and real-world conversations he’s had with friends to inform his own personal take on the scenario, while his fellow students play the roles and do the behind the scenes work to make his vision a reality.

Unfortunately, because everyone involved in the project is so young, and the scenario being retreaded is so deeply ingrained in YA culture, the whole thing comes across as achingly juvenile and naïve in its aspect. The dialogue is fearfully childish at most points and the painful ways the youngsters interact and flirt with each other is almost too difficult to watch at times. There is never a naturalism to the way the performances are given and most scenes are stilted by one thing or another in the way they are presented. While Nair does manage to show some narrative chops in the way he builds his story and subsequently films it, the vast majority of scenes involve two people in a room saying things to each other that don’t really have a lot of meaning behind them.

Throw into the mix the fact that these student filmmakers have not yet honed their craft, and what we get is bare, tinny audio, bad acting, basic cinematography, and an overuse of standard cinematic devices to tell the story. At twenty-two minutes long, Almost Always has enough time to build its narrative and round out its characters a little, with Nair spending enough on each part of the story to keep us looking for what’s coming next, but by the end we can only be disappointed by how little the details diverge from the main retelling of a tale that has been told several hundred times several hundred ways. There is sadly not enough to distinguish Almost Always from other unrequited young love stories that end in tragedy, but in the same breath there’s definitely enough for the filmmakers to take away with them that they can use and build on in future projects.