Self-destructive characters were a recurring theme at VIFF this year, and none that I had seen had more shock value than actor Anthony Shim's feature-length directorial debut with Daughter. An all-British Columbia production, this dreary film is an examination of a divorced dad going through hell as he attempts to reconcile with his past. 

(Spoilers ahead). 

John Cassini plays Jim, a wealthy 50-something owner of a real estate company who is trying to overcome the suicide of his teenage daughter and a bitter divorce. He spends most of his time alone in a penthouse overlooking the city, having few belongings and treating his residence as little more than a drinking hole. The only company he keeps is a bottle of bourbon and a string of high-end call girls. 

One of them is Nikki (Teagan Vincze), a young 20-something whom Jim immediately feels attached to, and even more so when he learns she has the same name as his daughter, Tracy. Although she works as an escort, the relationship depicted seems more platonic than sexual. They smoke a joint together, lay in bed and eat chocolates. They eat grilled cheese sandwiches from a food truck and he shows her his old stomping grounds. They even go to jazz bars together. You get the feeling that Nikki/Tracy has become a force of good for Jim, who gets a second chance at being a good father. But that's where the good stuff ends. 

Through flashbacks, we learn more about Jim: his relationship with his wife, Anna (Jenn MacLean-Angus, Cassini's real-life wife), had been deteriorating for some time; his daughter, Tracy (Jordyn Ashley Olsen), is getting mixed up with the wrong crowd; and his mother, Lilian (Gabrielle Rose), suffers from dementia and lives in an old folks' home. 

It's a cascade of awful events, and I'm deeply reminded of the Joker's origin as a man who's been beaten up and struck down and having a terrible, terrible day. It's not without his own doing, though. He drinks too much and confronts everyone angrily, until one night he confronts the wrong people and gets the ass kicking of his life at which point his anger subsides. It’s cliched conflict, from the argument at a strip club to the argument at a jazz club to the argument at a bar, both in how he acts and how others respond to him.  

But this constant beatdown of Jim is where the film keeps losing me. Self-destruction can be easy to depict, but it's also easy to lose sympathy for the character if the events that lead to his self-destruction are self-inflicted. Jim's been self-destructive even before the death of his daughter, and it becomes an excuse for him to lash out. We don’t feel sympathy because it doesn’t seem like he has or does anything good, ever. As an audience, we need a reason to think he is worthy of help.

When it becomes time for Jim to reconcile with his wife, Daughter drops one last bombshell: Tracy was date raped at a party (though it’s so blatantly telegraphed in the beginning it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise) and publicly humiliated in the worst way, and the reason she chooses to kill herself. He later burns her clothes in anger, a decision that makes me really wonder where the logic lies. This is where it really attempts to jolt you into paying attention, but it feels tacky, as if the rest of the film didn’t annoy or disgust you enough. I'm taken aback by this revelation and wonder if there's a bigger purpose to her heartbreaking death than for the audience to emotionally justify Jim's actions, who either doesn't know the full story or makes no attempt to avenge his daughter.

The most enjoyable parts of the film are the slower, quieter moments between Cassini and Vincze, who is charming and sensitive and very much the manic pixie dream girl. If the film is about self-destructive characters I am less interested in the why and more interested in the redemption arc of the how and the when. When the movie ends, Jim's redemption is only just beginning. 

Daughter gets two and a half stars out of four.