Pink Skies Ahead (2020)

(On Cable TV, March 2022) It doesn’t take much more than ninety seconds for Pink Skies Ahead to establish that its protagonist is an unlikable self-centred moronic young woman—an anxious college drop-out unable to take any responsibility for her problems. With an introduction like that, things can only go up, but writer-director Kelly Oxford has a tough job navigating a tricky line between redemption and the protagonist repeatedly making life even more difficult for herself. This is about as far as we can get from the competent heroine archetype, and credits go to Jessica Barden in keeping the audience on-board even as her character goes out of her way to irritate both the other characters around her and the audience along the way. There is, fortunately, some verve to the dialogue and scene-building. It’s all clearly part of a conscious artistic intention—and to Pink Skies Ahead’s credit, the protagonist’s mental health issues are not as cut-and-dried as in most other movies—but I don’t really have to like it. As I mention from time to time—sure, you can make the protagonist exasperating, upend a number of heroic tropes and lock the audience in a dreary environment to justify it all, but then you have to accept that audiences may not be overly happy with the result.