An investment banker struggles to grieve for his wife in this Toronto film festival opener while as an audience, we struggle to care

Jean-Marc Vallée could be quite easily categorised as an “actor’s director”. His last two films notched up two acting Oscars and a further two acting nominations between them (Dallas Buyers Club and Wild) so it’s therefore easy to understand why talent would be drawn to his next project. But Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts will surely be left feeling a little flattened by Demolition, a frustratingly aimless soul-search that veers uncomfortably between quirk and melancholy.

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Gyllenhaal stars as a bored investment banker who loses his wife in a car crash. But not even her violent death can shake him out of a funk that sees him sleepwalk through life from a job he doesn’t want to a home he doesn’t like. After he has trouble getting a bag of M&Ms out of a vending machine, he begins a series of letters to the company’s customer service department and it blesses him with an unlikely outlet for the dispassionate inertia that suffocates his life. Watts stars as the employee who reads his letters and, inexplicably, becomes moved by their content. The pair then start a left-field friendship, along with her troubled son, allowing him to find a way to connect with the world once again.

While the plot sounds like a mawkish melodrama, aping the plots of films such as Things We Lost in the Fire, Demolition sets out to defy expectation at the outset. Gyllenhaal’s lead is unable to grieve for his wife, struggling to emote and mourn her loss, even questioning his love for her entirely. It’s an angle which could have led to some interestingly dark territory but as edgy as Bryan Sipe’s script clearly wants to be, this is a boringly safe film, focused on pushing our confused character into the family unit he so clearly needs to be a part of.

One of the main problems with the plot is the sheer implausibility of it all. It’s virtually impossible to buy the chain of events that pulls the two leads together. Gyllenhaal’s letters are unconvincing Fight Club-lite analyses of the uniform world around him and it’s hard to see how anyone would do anything other than roll their eyes while reading them. When paired with Watts, the two have a chemistry-free dynamic that sucks any energy out of Vallée’s light-footed direction.

It’s a disappointment, given how they’ve both been trying to dig their way out of career holes. Gyllenhaal tries his best but he’s lumped with dialogue that would make Zach Braff turn his nose up (“Do you ever feel like everything is a metaphor?”) and ultimately he’s playing less of a character and more a collection of hazy-eyed stoner thoughts. Watts has even less to do and bizarrely disappears for a large portion of the film as her on-screen son becomes Gyllenhaal’s conduit to the real world.

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The unlikely script is hampered with failed attempts at magical realism and leaden metaphors. Gyllenhaal’s character becomes obsessed with deconstructing objects and demolishing buildings, leading to the film’s title. But, you guessed it, all this means something deeper about his life …

The film is so desperate to reach some level of profundity that it misses wildly in the process. Its remarkable emptiness and muddled narrative give it the feeling of a Hollywood remake of a foreign film that lost all meaning in translation. There’s an interesting kernel of an idea here that explores characters who rebel against forced adulthood and the relationships and jobs that come with it. But instead it collapses into insufferable cuteness (one scene has the pair turn a sofa into a den) and, despite dreams of something less conventional, sentimentality prevails. In the future, any Oscar-seeking actors might want to have a closer read of the script next time they decide to work with Vallée.