PLOT: A young Native woman searching for her mother is helped in her quest by the spirits of other missing Nativ e women.

Unnatural And Accidental is a lousy film about an important subject. The film is specifically about a serial killer who preyed on Native women in Vancouver, and generally about the high incidence of violence against Indigenous women in this country.

The film is an adaptation of the play The Unnatural And Accidental Women by Metis playwright Marie Clements. Clements' work dramatized the real-life deaths of several women on skid row in Vancouver, all of them Native and all dead of what appeared to be alcohol poisoning. In coroner's terms, the deaths were unnatural and accidental; one man is link ed to the deaths but was convicted of manslaughter only once. His m.o. was to give the women fatal amounts of alcohol.

The women in Vancouver are but a few of the many Native women who die as a result of violence -- and statistics say Native women are more likely to die in that fashion than are other women. Based on the lack of police or media interest in such deaths, these women are, apparently, expendable.

In Unnatural And Accidental, a young woman named Rebecca (Carmen Moore) searches for her mother in the flop-houses on the seedy side of town. She asks various women -- prostitutes, drunks, grifters -- if they've seen her mother, and then the film shows us the fate of some of those women. They are preyed upon by a mechanic named Norman (Callum Keith Rennie), who paralyzes them with liquor, sexually assaults them and then pours enough alcohol down their throats to kill them. (These scenes are among the more brutal and horrifying we've witnessed at the movies.)

Rebecca has a spiritual connection to the dead women, who guide her, although that 's all a bit murky. Soon enough, she too encounters Norman, but in R ebecca he finally meets his match.

Unnatural And Accidental is caught somewhere between the stage and the big screen, and it just doesn't work . The film is hobbled by amateurish storytelling and it offers little insight into the how or why of the lives the women lead.

Too bad. It's a noble attempt, but the subject matter deserves better.

BOTTOM LINE: You can see the good intentions, but this is a problematic film, with the usual low-budget drawbacks plus horrifying assault scenes.

(This film is rated 14-A)
More Movie Reviews