Movie Review: Trippy, indulgent nonsense should make this filmmaker “Reflect” on everywhere she went wrong

“Reflect” is a “find yourself” odyssey about five 30ish Angelinas who travel to Sedona, Arizona, for a spiritual/self-actualizing “obstacle course” weekend in a place the Tarot-card-reades/Astrology-believer/crystal-consultants of Flakey America consider a spiritual vortex.

Writer-director-star Dana Kippel might be exploring the psychic scars of the mother-daughter bond (she herself is adopted) via the characters and their trippy encounters and hallucinations on this vision quest.

She might be serving up a parable of emotional winners and losers and how losers can discover what is holding them back by exploring mother-daughter trauma, and connecting with something greater than themselves in a literal “Game of Life.”

Or “Reflect” might be a parody of everything described above and the sort of indulgent, ditzy narcissists who believe in this multi-layered nonsense.

A hint about that last possibility is that for all the over-the-top characters and bitchy “girl” on girl bickering amongst the five female friends — Kippel, and Grace Patterson, Ariana Brown, Jadelyn Breier and Marissa Patterson — very little that happens here could be objectively described as “funny.

Even the flashes of rank amateruism in some of the acting among the loopy “guides” who run this retreat (Joe Filippone, Campbell Crates), the wiccans/Satanists (Dash Katz, Maya Knell, etc) they encounter, the father-son “Game of Life” “show” hosts (Robert Enriquez and Ryan Jack Connell) who appear to be manipulating events and experiences in these self-discover “courses,” are never more than broad, mirth-free cartoons, not amusing or realistic three or even two dimensional characters.

The “insights” are trite, the characters thinly-sketched irritants and the indulgent, self-absorbed “journey” story makes too little sense to be easy to “trip” through. Not that there’s any motivation at all for the viewer to make that effort.

But perhaps the filmmaker got more out of the experience than the viewer was ever meant to. At least she and her cast and crew got to spend time in some of the loveliest desert scenery in North America.

Rating: unrated, profanity, suggestions of hallucinogenics

Cast: Dana Kippel, Grace Patterson, Ariana Brown, Jadelyn Breier, Marissa Patterson, Joe Filippone, Robert Enriquez, Dash Katz, Campbell Crates and Ryan Jack Connell.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dana Kippel. A Cranked Up release.

Running time: 1:24

About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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