‘Westhampton’ Review – A Clever, Yet Sluggish Story Of Grief And Acceptance

A struggling filmmaker is making a semi-autobiographical film about an event from his youth. In his own words, he describes the film as “a shitty Garden State.” The aforementioned film explores a tortured character who returns to their hometown to confront past traumas while navigating the townspeople. In essence, that is what we have here with Westhampton, though minus the sh—- attribution. The film explores trauma while exorcising ghosts years later. While the pacing is lethargic, it is clever to use the filmmaking angle to give the story an interesting wrinkle in an otherwise familiar narrative.  The plot device raises the question of how we discern truth from fiction, and how we wish to remake events from actuality.

Tom Bell (Finn Wittrock) returns to his hometown of Westhampton to present a screening of his film (also titled Westhampton). In addition, after the sale of his childhood home, he looks to collect some boxes of his old items. The homecoming marks a turning point for Tom and stirs up the past. Years earlier, he was involved in a car crash that killed his girlfriend, Beth. His film attempts to fictionalize the tragic events of his past. 

As he makes his way through Westhampton, he crosses paths with two types of people. Those who are enamored with his minor celebrity status and those who wish he would get out of town before sundown. He clashes with Beth’s older brother, now turned town cop Dickie (Jake Weary). He also intersects with Beth’s younger sister, Avery (Amy Forsyth), who bears a striking resemblance to Beth. Wrestling with guilt and acceptance, Tom tries to find peace in a place that has been nothing but pain.

For much of Westhampton, we are treated to a movie-within-a-movie—the fictionalized account by Tom of what happened on that fateful night in high school. Using black and white allows for a clear distinction between the fictional events and thoughts of the actual present-day timeline. However, there is a twist at the end. It calls into question the validity of the movie-within-a-movie and what supposedly happened in real life.

Now, the twist is a jaw-dropping shocker, and part of that is the film’s pacing. The moment feels like a mic-drop, and yet there is little electricity running throughout the film. Too much time is spent on lingering shots that amount to nothing. In moments where the tempo should pick up, the energy stalls, feeling more like a tiresome lecture than anything narrative-urgent.

Those issues aside, the acting is sharp, particularly by Wittrock, who carries the story from beginning to end. This is his journey of traumatic reckoning. When the script allows, there are incredible character moments, and Wittrock hits it out of the park. There is a great sense of burden that accompanies him from the moment he enters the movie at a screening of his own film. That weight carries throughout the story, giving him a sense of resolve only when he addresses the lingering ghosts and scars of his past.

In addition, the supporting cast of Weary and Forsyth is a nice complement to Wittrock. In particular, they offer two distinct reactions that embody the town’s feelings toward him. And that is another area where the film succeeds: establishing a deep bench of community. Westhampton never feels like a film executed on a backlot. The location for filming, coupled with the cinematography, breathes in the reality that we are actually there in the coffee shops, at the high school, on the sidewalks. The film captures the feel of a small town, coupled with the frustration and resentment that can stem from old wounds.

There is a lot this film has to offer, and much of it involves confronting the truth. Everything in life comes from a sense of bias. The framing of a tragedy in the story explores and exposes how much of life filters through one’s sense of reality, be it actuality or how we wish it to be. The fact that Tom is a filmmaker is no accident in the story. The movie-within-the-movie is a statement on truth and fiction, and, interestingly, that idea carries over to the film proper, allowing us to wrestle with the blurred lines.

Westhampton is currently playing in theaters in New York and Los Angeles courtesy of Obscured Releasing. 

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