Fear of Dancing (2020)
(On TV, November 2022) I don’t really want to be too hard on Fear of Dancing’s writer-director Michael Allcock, but really: This is a film about the fear of dancing and that’s that. I’ll dress it up a bit: the formal name for fear of dancing is chorophobia and while some people don’t have it, some other people clearly do. Allcock travels around the world from Toronto to Africa in a quest to understand, well, fear of dancing. But how much of a documentary can you do on that? What if you get to interview Stephen Fry and the result is merely quite interesting? I should be a natural audience for this film—I only dance when no one’s looking, and somehow ended up in a place in life where an unwillingness to dance has zero impact on my life. But I gamely failed to be anything but mildly interested by Fear of Dancing. Parts of it appeared unbearably obvious, while other moments felt incredibly overdone. The climactic sequences (in which Allcock dances by himself on an isolated beach, away from his camera crew, wearing VR goggles, and then dances with a high-school crush) led to a big shrug—or was it my shoulders telling the rest of my body to dance? Ah well—not all documentaries are winners.