LFF 2014:Jamie Marks Is Dead

The netherworld between death and the afterlife becomes a metaphor for confused adolescence, as if that's a new and exciting idea, in this frustratingly obtuse YA adaptation. Cameron Monaghan plays a charisma-free teen we're meant to invest in, Morgan Saylor (even more irritatingly brattish than she is as Homeland's Dana) is his hot-and-cold-blowing apparent love interest, and Noah Silver the ghost of a recently-deceased schoolchum who was most likely murdered for modelling his look on Harry Potter.

All teenagers, as we know, are either jocks or morbid goths, and it's the latter we're lucky enough to spend 101 miserable minutes with in Jamie Marks Is Dead, as the titular corpse mopes about with Monaghan for reasons which make themselves unclear as the film wafts by. The atmosphere is eerie but too dull to be scary, and the story shuffles through nonsensical moments and inconsequential subplots like a bored zombie. Puberty, sexuality and isolation are the themes, but this is unlikely to speak to anyone trying to navigate any of those issues unless they happen to be comatose and looking for something to calm them down.