More Beautiful for Having Been Broken review – utterly bizarre stilted soap opera

In 2003, self-financed LA movie director Tommy Wiseau stunned audiences with his film The Room: a legendary cult jawdropper, whose making was immortalised in James Franco’s film The Disaster Artist. Many have asked whether there can ever be another to rival that?

More Beautiful for Having Been Broken is utterly bizarre. It’s like a daytime soap on Xanax, written, directed and acted in a kind of stilted near-coma – part emotional issue drama, part erotic gay drama-thriller. That title is a reference to the Japanese term kintsukuroi, the art of repairing broken pottery and appreciating repaired pottery – like treasuring people for their human flaws.

A big-city FBI agent called McKenzie (Zoe Ventoura) has had to take some leave after a job went violently wrong (a fuzzy flashback hints coyly and incompletely at what happened) and so takes a restorative trip to a little country town. Here McKenzie meets some of the sweet, honest down-home folk, including a woman the offscreen narrator sonorously describes as “an anti-feminist feminist, who believed that women could be insanely powerful but still be full of grace and beauty”. (In which case, that should be “pro-feminist feminist”. Or you could just go ahead and say “feminist”.)

McKenzie meets Samantha (Kayla Radomski), a dance teacher and single mother of a disabled boy. McKenzie and Samantha have an intense connection, and their eventual sex is rendered as an excruciatingly tasteful fantasy dance sequence. But – wouldn’t you just know it? – one of the other women in town happens to be a former member of Congress with whom McKenzie also had a drunken fling, back in the day! Their recognition of each other is the cue for the most flabbergastingly wooden acting I have ever seen on any screen of any size.

The pious bumper-sticker philosophies and crashing tonal mismatches are spectacular. “Mistakes are like birthday candles – the more you blow out, the wiser you become,” drones the narrator. And McKenzie’s hatchet-faced FBI superior intones: “Grief is a scraggy bitch, and she doesn’t give a royal fuck about your best intentions.” So true.