A Thousand Kisses Deep Review

Nicely glossed melodrama that lacks the poetic depths of its musical namesake.

There’s a theory that by revisiting the traumatic past events of one’s life, a person can rid themselves of the psychological pain caused in the present. It's such an idea that underpins director Dana Lustig's jazz-glossed melodrama, and one that feels apt next to the lyrics of the titular Leonard Cohen song that bookend it.

Indeed, A Thousand Kisses Deep puts its central character Mia (Jodie Whittaker) firmly on the psychiatrist's couch. Having witnessed her neighbour commit suicide by jumping from her apartment building, Mia discovers fragments of a photo of an ex-lover scattered around the body.

Convinced this is a projection of her own future which she must alter, she confides in the building’s caretaker – a Doctor Who-esque time lord (played by a criminally underused David Warner) who swaps the TARDIS for a rickety residential elevator that takes Mia back to the most significant stages of her life.

It’s as if someone picked Charlie Kaufman’s brain for an hour, leaving out the all-important footnotes that translate his ideas into such wonderfully realised surrealism. But Lustig, best known for producing cult indie hit Brick, still conjures an adequately intoxicating picture, held together by an impassioned, brassy semblance of a mind falling to pieces.

The further Mia goes down the rabbit hole of her own life, revisiting her abusive former boyfriend and mother's death (Emilia Fox), the more engaging these disturbing memories become.

Opposite Whittaker, Dougray Scott is strangely perfect as the tortured jazz musician, Ludwig, whose sexual vices tangle him with with Mia at intermittent stages. A darkly funny birthday party scene, involving Ludwig in clown makeup, a drunken Emilia Fox and a gun, is particularly surreal.

Herein also lies the rub: half plotted around Mia’s troubled past, half around her sci-fi travels, we're left with a focus that's spread too thin. The further we go with Mia, the more awkwardly placed the film’s Freudian time travel element feels, as we’re thrown out of another vignette and back into the reality of an apartment elevator that never conveys a real sense of psychologically tenable.

Certainly, there are other grudges to be had: hammy dialogue; nasty plot holes and many pacing issues. Yet, maybe it’s just the soothing murmurs of that mellow trumpet, but there’s a compelling, sultry and ambitious air that can’t quite be shaken.