A well-crafted chamber piece interested in fame, trauma, and performative allyship, “I’ll Show You Mine” works towards a well-earned breakthrough for its audience and characters yet does little with it once secured. A true two-hander, the film by director Megan Griffiths gives off theater vibes, harkening back to Samuel Beckett and even Edward Albee with its conversational backbone and philosophical underpinnings. This one’s got fun characters working through intriguing stuff, to be sure, yet neither the ultimate substance of the narrative nor the form in which it is presented mark it as particularly notable.
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“I’ll Show You Mine” opens with author Priya Sura (Poorna Jagannathan) cyberstalking former model and nephew-by-marriage, Nic (Casey Thomas Brown), ahead of his pending arrival at her house. A flash in the pan viral sensation about five years past his sell-by date, Nic has agreed to sit for a multi-day interview with Priya, who found her own low-level celebrity at around the same time as him when she published a memoir about her abusive father. Nic’s party-boy antics and Priya’s failed follow-up book have both of them hungry for a comeback, yet once the pair begin speaking, it becomes clear that this is less of an interview and more of a two-way mental siege.
As Priya probes around Nic’s past in search of a gotcha moment to support her new book’s narrative spine, she’s forced to delve deeper into her own trauma (much to her dismay). Priya’s public-facing author persona is that of an open book, where her trauma and baggage are on display in every airport Hudson and Amazon ribbon ad, yet the shared histories of the two allow Nic to find the seams and edges around this front. Their conversations and interactions over the course of two days and an evening provide both characters an opportunity to take turns as interrogator and provides a meaningful arc for each.
It’s interesting, frequently captivating, and just raw enough to present with a sheen of legitimacy in a cinematic landscape that’s explored familial trauma to death. And while Griffiths executes a wonderful breakthrough for her characters, she can’t quite find her denouement: leaving Priya and Nic dangling a bit at the end. No spoilers, but it’s sort of like a treasure hunt movie that ends immediately upon the discovery of the chest filled with gold coins. Getting the prize is great and all, but the real fun is finding out what these characters are going to do once they’ve reached that mountaintop.
The format for this one is also a bit curious, for as already stated, the whole production feels more fitting for the stage, and little about the way it’s presented seems to demand a cinematic conveyance. Although Griffiths goes hand-held for some of the more intense moments, nothing about “I’ll Show You Mine” feels enhanced or informed by the lighting, score, or cinematography. There are ways to use the medium of cinema to enhance a piece such as this, like how Mike Nichols played with depth of field to heighten tension in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf” or how Elia Kazan used a shrinking set on “A Streetcar Named Desire” to reflect the claustrophobia of his characters. Although the script, Brown, and Jagannathan are doing great work to lay the seeds of subtext and character growth, the film and its production writ large never quite come up to this level.
Which doesn’t make this a bad movie by any means, just a little incomplete and ill-suited for the screen. The broader piece is well-paced, full of surprises, and goes in several fascinating directions that connect more than a few intriguing dots, and for that, it should be commended. Jagannathan is sturdy as the emotional compass of the film and ably carries some of the more subtle and nuanced moments authored by Brown, who is given much more to do on the surface. A series of animated chapter breaks act as narrative guard rails throughout the picture, and while their connection to an under-explored porn comics subplot is a bit distracting, they are nonetheless a creative way to probe some of the story’s inferred tangents.
A compelling if somewhat incomplete character study that gives its actors plenty to do, “I’ll Show You Mine” might not live up to its potential, yet as Nic repeatedly points out, neither do he and Priya. If that was the point Griffiths and the movie were trying to make all along; it was a well-made one. [C+]