Oy, what a wet day Wednesday was. It just seemed to rain all darn day. So what better way to lift the mood than to see a movie about teenage suicide!?"Bridgend" was my only selection for the festival's seventh day, and it's a fictionalized account about
a real town in Wales where 79 teenagers committed suicide from 2007 to 2012. A girl named Sarah moves there with her police officer father, and the quiet, horse-rider soon falls in with a group of rambunctious teenagers who aren't total normal underneath their partying ways.
The premise is eerily intriguing: a "cult" of teenagers who one-by-one kill themselves in a secluded forest. What is so damning about this film is that instead of focusing on the teenagers, a young, quiet protagonist girl is inserted into the story and it turns into a coming-of-age bit, so much so that her father asks her "What is happening to you?", a line almost always said by a parental figure to the main character in a film like this.
Sarah's adventure with this dark group isn't anything new, and barely holds a flame to films like "Kids" and "Thirteen", it's just a way to break into the story of why are these kids committing suicide?
Like in real life, the film has no answers for it.
