EMR

Adam (Adam Leese) is a London warehouse worker with epilepsy. He spends his spare time online amidst his cats, talking to cyber girlfriend Lillian (Whitney Cummings) from San Francisco. Helping to ease the humdrum nature of his daily existence, he carries a Lonely Planet guide of San Francisco under his arm to remind him of his primary goal of getting over there to rendezvous with Lill.

Things begin to go hideously wrong when he starts waking up in pools of blood, cut and bruised and in need of quick answers. He misses days at work, with no apparent recollection, seemingly oblivious of what is happening to him. Then we learn that the doctor has changed his prescription to a new trial drug, which may be a clue to these weird turns.

Every other day, he wakes in San Francisco alongside the woman of his dreams. Even with state-of-the-lab NHS medicine, this is pushing it a bit. The mystery continues until the end, with its guessable, farcical finale.

Co-writer/director James Erskine's project is ambitious, but messy. Convoluted and amateurish in its narrative, it chops and changes from one plotline to the next, which after about 45 minutes, turns in on itself and implodes feebly. On a continuum to hell, Adam keeps finding himself in unexplainable circumstances, but none of the scenarios, imaginary or real (who knows), manages to stimulate the audience's curiosity enough to find out what's really going on.

This is no fault of the actors. Leese does a good job characterising the perplexed epileptic and Cummings fills the space of his San Franciscan girlfriend in an underwritten, yet pivotal role. Some of support parts are a bit amateurish, it has to be said, especially the female GP who looks like she's performing in a school play.

Against all the odds, Erskine and co-writer/director Danny McCullough did well to get the film made - it has a simultaneous DVD release - but it's a pity that a clever idea ends up as a predictable sham.