Final Cut

Starred review from June 15, 2020
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Young, the narrator of this outstanding psychological thriller from Watson (Before I Sleep), needs a new assignment to keep her career’s momentum. But Alex isn’t enthusiastic when her producer receives an unsigned postcard urging her to go Blackwood Bay, a small English town that was the site of smuggling operations centuries ago. The job is to document daily life in Blackwood Bay. As town residents send their own videos to Alex, she’s more interested in the disappearances of three teenage girls over the past decade. It’s not the project that Alex dreads, but dredging up lost memories, since Alex believes she’s one of those girls. She has no idea why she fled—perhaps because she was in danger. Having changed her looks, Alex digs into the girls’ backgrounds while keeping her identity secret and trying to remember which of the residents she might have known. A tight, brisk plot drives this sharp character study. Watson perfectly capture small town ennui while illustrating how corruption can hide in plain sight. Agent: Clare Conville, Conville & Walsh (U.K.).

June 15, 2020
A documentarian gets more than she bargains for when she chooses remote Blackwood Bay as the location of her next film. Alexandra Young's harrowing first film, Black Winter, won her accolades, but her second film was a failure, and she needs another hit or her career may be in jeopardy. Alex wants to document what life is like in a small village in the north of England by asking people to send in their own footage, which she would then curate. She secures funding, and the people who hold the purse strings coax her into choosing Blackwood Bay, where she spent a troubled childhood, as her subject. She wouldn't have chosen it herself, but with her career on the line, she agrees. It's also made clear that she's to look into the suicide of 15-year-old Daisy Willis, who plunged off a cliff to her death a decade ago. Daisy's body was never found, but suicide was a foregone conclusion. Then, seven years later, Zoe Pearson, another teen, went missing. After the project is announced to Blackwood Bay citizens, the video clips started pouring in. However, to properly look into the disappearances, Alex must travel to Blackwood Bay. She does have faint memories of the town, but now it's as if she's "seeing it through a filter, a distorting prism." As she gathers footage and probes the residents, it's clear that some people don't believe Daisy killed herself and that the incident could be connected to Zoe's disappearance. Alex doesn't quite see how the two could be related, but she does sense an insidious rot lingering under the coastal town's quaint facade. When another teen girl goes missing, the town is looking for someone to blame, and no one is safe, not even Alex. Before she knows it, Alex is no longer a passive observer: She's part of the story. Watson gradually turns up the heat while carefully teasing out wicked secrets that the town would rather keep buried, and Alex, who has her own secrets, makes an appealing, if possibly unreliable, narrator. The darkness runs deep in this skillfully plotted chiller.

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March 1, 2020

Nothing much happens in quiet Blackwood Bay, a village in northern England once famous as a smugglers' haven, until two local girls go missing. When a hungry documentary filmmaker lands in town, ready and willing to tell the larger story of its residents, she finds the current tragedy has only deepened what is already a grim mood occasioned by economic downturn. From the author of that megahit Before I Go To Sleep; with a 100,000-copy first printing.

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