Pinky – review

Director: Zah Ahmad

Release date: 2020

Contains spoilers

This film, which includes energy vampires, didn’t really know what it wanted to be, I fear. Classing itself as part of the fantasy genre it was, indeed, far from horror but, had the right direction been in place it might have been able to tap into the uncanny and offer some thrills and chills. As it stands it did nothing like that.

It also suffered from two dimensional characters and a very limited plot (especially for a film that hung around longer than it really should have).

Annabella in pain

It starts with a woman, Annabella (Bethany Billy), walking along a path in the countryside. This is clearly a period scene and she is clearly heavily pregnant. She seems in pain and screams… Pinky (Luke Anthony) wakes from the dream and realises he is late meeting his mates (going to a club). This is where the film lost me slightly in that the three friends seem inept, especially when it came to the art of seduction, which made them seem younger than the actors. It seems that Pinky is rich (apparently, he certainly doesn’t seem to work) and has just bought a house. Why he is called Pinky is not explained, but I suspect it’s a nickname.

seeing auras

Anyway, they are failing to attract female attention but then get a look from some girls at a table. They go and sit with them and are sent to get drinks and food. At the bar another girl, Sarah (Heather Nicol), comes over and it is clear she is interested in Pinky. When asked why he doesn’t look to her romantically, he says she has a boyfriend (Troy Hewitt) who is bigger than him – he also has a specific someone in mind, Charlene (Amy Alexander). In the club we discover he can see auras and he ends up in some argy-bargy with a guy (with a flashback to their interaction in a past life) and being kicked out of the club.

entering a different state

Charlene treats him like rubbish, ‘forgetting’ when she is meant to go on a date with him and forcing him to go to yoga instead. At the yoga class he opens up his abilities and we see that he can hear someone’s inner monologue and also that a shadowy entity is stalking him. He hears from Charlene’s inner monologue that she is purposefully stringing him along (partly because she doesn’t want him to break her heart again). The heartache she speaks of would seem to be connected to the past life where Pinky and Charlene were married but he cheated on her with Annabella, the maid, and got her pregnant.

energy vampire

The film just sails around the Charlene buoy over and over. Sarah is also sensitive and she takes him to expert Alex White (Anthony Head, Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Let the Wrong One In) who says that he is an empath and that the shadowy female figure is an energy vampire (and also an amalgam of all wronged women but primarily the similarly gifted Annabella). White warns Sarah off the damaged young man but she won’t listen as, despite her boyfriend – who is jealous and abusive, she loves Pinky.

vampirism in action

So the spirit of Anabella is an energy vampire (we see her attack Sarah at one point, with the woman managing to save herself with psychic self defence) and, at one point, we also see Pinky attacking someone with vampirism. All through the film Pinky’s psychic stress manifests as cold sores. The characters are shallow and not constructed meaningfully, with the lads drawn as nothing more than horny kids. Pinky tries to abuse his gifts to get laid (he’s a virgin) but it fails (and probably the inner monologues he hears are from the subconscious not conscious thoughts).

psychic self defence

The shifting into another dimensional state is shown through filters but we do get some cgi energy fighting with the vampirism shown as black particles and combatted by light energy. The film desperately needed more meaningful characterisation, it needed 15 – 20 minutes shaving away and it needed to hook into a sense of the uncanny. The dialogue also needed work – the emotionally stunted Pinky who has just developed talents declaring himself, to Charlene, as the next step in human evolution sounded ridiculous, for example.

Not great. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.