The Shrowdinger

A father and daughter take some time out in the wilderness to talk through their issues with one another, with the added difficulty of at least one of them being purely imaginary.

Joseph Albert Irwin (Eden) is out on a camping trip with his daughter in the family caravan, which is fondly known as The Shrowdinger. Katherine Madison Irwin (Bentea) is barely putting up with the fact that she has to be there with him, and so she is 100% making the time her own and making her own decisions about what she does while she’s there. The two of them get on each other’s nerves like any father and daughter might, but it’s obvious that whatever it is that needs shared between them, they are there to do some sharing. The shocking revelation which comes early on, that Kat died three days ago, then sets the scene for some pretty intense discussions on the nature of their relationship.

There’s a lot to unpack in the recent history of the Irwin family, about Kat’s death, about the argument which took place before she left the house, about Joseph’s guilt, not to mention all the crap that happened earlier on with the divorce and the suicide attempt. This trip outdoors seems long overdue by the amount of ground needed to be covered by the two campers, and we are invited to spend the day with the two of them to hear just how they got themselves to where they are. The fact that one of them is dead only adds a frisson of originality to the premise of what would otherwise be a fairly ordinary relationship drama.

The Shrowdinger takes place as a two-handed chamber piece, only that the chamber is an outdoor campfire beside a caravan. There are scant other characters around, and only one who really gets himself involved in the narrative, with all the others hanging in the background or only in the frame to provide human scenery. Writer, Ben Eden, who also plays the lead of Joseph Irwin, keeps the focus firmly on the father/daughter dynamic and provides plenty of pages of dialogue which you can imagine he has already used or heard in his own conversations. This keeps the film dialogue heavy, but realistic and relatable enough that you don’t always notice some of the pacing issues of the scenes until they’re over. The heart and tenderness of the conversations is matched by their gravity, and especially towards the end, the message is really carried forward by the characters’ words.

Unfortunately, the technical aspects of the film really let it down in terms of it being accessible to the viewer. The audio is all over the place, coming in and out here and there, being patched in from different takes and edits, not always being matched to the video, making it difficult to focus on what’s being said when pitch, volume and background noise are all interchanging along with the dialogue. The same goes for the video, with some scenes feeling like a collage of takes with differing light, quality of video, time of day or other inconsistencies chopping up the flow of what should be continuous and fluid. The score, too, from Zachariah Kitchell, does very little throughout most of the film but then pops up at times to offer some bare mood music, usually while the camera focuses on someone’s face before shifting to some grainy footage of wildlife.

As a feature debut for director Amanda Keith, it’s easy to see that there’s still a lot to be learned from The Shrowdinger in terms of getting the most from a crew and in putting a film together. There’s a responsibility of fixing issues as you come across them, and ironing them out for the rest of the production, that appears to be missing from The Shrowdinger, and the end result suffers for that. For what is an original, genuinely heartfelt, well rounded and scripted story, The Shrowdinger is lacking as a film, and people may wonder if it’s a box worth looking inside of before they invest eighty-four minutes of their time in it.