Jane’s Not Here (writer/dir. Jonathan Oster), World Premiere at Dances With Films: LA
A slow-burn mystery that keeps you guessing and rewards you for staying to the end.
Waking from a coma should be the beginning of a patient’s recovery. In Jane’s Not Here, it is the beginning of her unraveling. Jane Hayes comes back from a devastating train accident carrying vivid memories of a husband and a son, and no one around her remembers either of them. As she leans on her brother to rebuild a life, the question is not only what happened to her family, but whether they were real at all.
That question is the engine of the film, and it is what I loved most about it. This story kept getting better and better, and the mystery became one I was obsessed to solve. The hints are dropped so slowly and so discreetly that I was invested through the very end. Writer-director Jonathan Oster trusts the viewer to lean in, and to keep guessing right up to one of the final scenes – the doorstep.
If the storytelling is the film’s strength, the pacing is where I would tighten. The birthday scene for son Tommy runs too long. It could be trimmed and still do its job, serving as a reference point for the later birthday with son Dylan. I also had trouble deciphering who was who. The brother, the husband, the two different sons, and the two women on the train are all Caucasion and of a certain age, and they look enough alike that I sometimes lost track of which thread I was following. In a story built on memory and doubt, a little more visual separation between the players would have helped me hold on.
Even so, the storyline is fascinating, and a little metaphysical. It leaves us open-minded but also satisfied, which is a hard balance to strike. The film does not insist on one tidy explanation, and I didn’t want it to. Because metaphysically we do not really know where the boundaries are. That openness is the point, and Jane’s Not Here holds it.
There is a real person behind this puzzle, and knowing his story deepens it. Jonathan Oster is a Minnesota-based filmmaker and composer making his feature debut here, after two festival shorts, Midway and Departure, and he wrote, directed, edited, and scored Jane’s Not Here himself. The film’s preoccupation with a parent’s love and loss was not abstract for him. “I wrote the script while grieving my father’s death, shot the film while awaiting the birth of my daughter, and edited it during the first few months of her life,” Oster says. “At its core, this is a film about the love a parent has for their child; a force powerful enough to endure grief, loss, and everything that tries to tear it apart.” That lived experience is all over the screen, and it gives the metaphysical mystery a warm, human pulse. Oster made the film with a stripped-down crew of just five, and that intimacy shows in the grounded, close-in feel of every scene.
The performances are solid. Amelia Louise Barr grounds the film as Jane, and Steve Mallers is steady as the brother she leans on, but the whole cast did a very good job, grounding a premise that could easily have floated away. And the production quality is genuinely strong. Visually, in its sound, and in its framing, the film is very satisfying, polished in a way that lets the mystery do its work.
Best of all, it ends on an up note, which I always appreciate. After a story this uncertain, being sent out on a hopeful beat feels earned rather than easy. Overall, Jane’s Not Here is a really good find at Dances With Films, the kind of small, thoughtful film that stays with you after the lights come up and keeps you turning it over in your mind.
Jane’s Not Here runs 105 minutes and had its World Premiere at Dances With Films: LA (Sunday, June 21, 6:30 PM, TCL Chinese Theatre, 6925 Hollywood Blvd). Writers: Jonathan Oster, Kim Buck. Director: Jonathan Oster. Producers: Jonathan Oster, Lukas Mooney. Director of Photography: Bella Demesquita. Music: Jonathan Oster. Cast: Amelia Louise Barr (Jane Hayes), Steve Mallers (the brother), Nicole Weber, Sasha Andreev, Teddy Marriott.
Rating / Verdict: ★★★★
