Wish You Were Here (2012)
Directed by Kieran Darcy-Smith
Four friends lose themselves in a carefree South-East Asian holiday. Only three come back. Dave and Alice return home to their young family desperate for answers about Jeremy's mysterious disappearance. When Alice's sister Steph returns not long after, a nasty secret is revealed about the night her boyfriend went missing. But it is only the first of many. Who amongst them knows what happened on that fateful night when they were dancing under a full moon in Cambodia?
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What critics compared Wish You Were Here to
The clearest reference point is Antonioni’s L’Avventura : a small group of friends visit a far-flung locale—here it’s Cambodia—where one of their number disappears without a trace.
There is a whole slew of cinema with which Wish We Were Here could very well be in conversation with, perhaps most notably something along the lines of L’avventura , where an alarming disappearance of one character causes an uncomfortable relationship to develop between those left behind.
Although this sort of premise dates back to films like “L’Avventura,” this is more of slow and heavy drama focusing more on the aftermath of Jeremy’s disappearance than the events leading up to it, while at the same time using a non-linear storytelling method to cut back to moments in Cambodia that may have led up to it.
Jeremy, the disappeared man, haunts the tale in a manner similar to the missing characters in more nuanced work like L’avventura or The Picnic at Hanging Rock .