Cake

A suicidal woman and her distraught neighbour bond over the baking of a cake one night when they’re both feeling at their lowest ebb.

Annabelle (Racic) is busy trying to hit a deadline. It’s already after ten and she’s got to get everything done by midnight. That is, she’s got to get her suicide note typed up and ready for whoever finds it, and her, after she kills herself on the stroke of the new day. The problem is that she can’t concentrate. How’s anybody supposed to find the right words for a sentimental, heartfelt, but to the point, death note when there’s a racket coming from the flat next door?

So, rather than trying to ride it out for the next couple of hours until it’s all over, Annabelle goes knocking on her neighbour’s door to ask him to turn the music down. Much to her surprise, however, Jack (Winkelmann) next door is in a total state himself, blubbering away like a little baby, covered in flour and egg, and barely holding himself together in any sort of way. He explains he’s trying to bake a cake for his dead mum’s birthday, the first since she passed, and he’s making a bit of a hash of it, so against her better judgement, Annabelle agrees to help him.

The majority of Cake, therefore, takes place in the single location of Jack’s flat, where he and Annabelle get to know each other as the cake is getting made. Luckily, the limited surroundings don’t diminish the story in any way, as they are captured perfectly by cinematographer Brandon Dougherty, getting the lighting right for the emotion of the scenario as well as the clarity needed to feel like we’re right in the room with the characters. This is also helped by the smart dialogue from writer/director, Olivia Cade, as Annabelle dances around Jack’s naïvely probing questions, whilst also getting to know more about him and his relationship with his mother.

There are little threads which are dropped around the place for the viewer to pick up on, and which circle back into the scenario later, that nicely bring the narrative together in the end, and which allow a level of satisfaction for the audience when all is said and done. The music choices, too, add a level of depth to the story, hitting just the right notes at the right time to evoke an emotion that fits perfectly with the scenario at hand. When matched with the genuine and believable performances of the two leads, everything comes together like the ingredients of the Cake that they are baking, and in the process becomes something more than the sum of its parts. There is a magic that happens in the ‘baking’ of the film which creates a true enjoyment in the viewer, leaving our mouth watering at the slice we’ve just devoured.

For what could easily have been just another misfit, antisocial, rom-com, with stock depressive characters who try to find reasons to be happy, Cake takes everything that it needs to do for the fifteen minutes that it’s in the oven for, and does it all brilliantly. While we all may have seen something like Cake before, it is guaranteed that no-one has ever had this particular flavour, and it’s the slight, delicate flavours of the ingredients which we might not expect that really pull everything together to make this a genuinely satisfying, bite-size, dish.