Shotgun is a fresh, free-spirited and absorbing rom-com that’s anything but predictable. It starts like you might expect; Elliot (Jeremy Allen White) is a man about town, free-spirited and living a play-hard, work-tomorrow kind of lifestyle; Mia is a little more down to earth, punching in a boring 9-5, with a dorky side to her personality.
But after a successful first date, Elliot gets results from the doctors to find out he has bone cancer, as Shotgun follows the young couple throw themselves into one another, because it’s the only way either knows how to deal with it.
Written and directed by Hannah Marks and Joey Power, the double act have created a whirlwind romance that’s honest and true. They have a fresh and exciting voice, and shoot the film with a frenetic, kinetic style that mirrors the central couple. Elliot and Mia race each other to the finish line, growing up a little too fast, and spend the final act of the movie trying to dial it back, with mixed results.
By now if you’re up to date on Shameless, it’s hard to watch Jeremy Allen White on-screen and not see Lip Gallagher, but that actually works here too. You could see Lip in New York, living this life, though his performance certainly doesn’t require you to be a Shameless fan to get it. Scream queen Maika Munroe is Allen’s perfect foil. Here more dorky and almost morkish against the devil-may-care Elliot, she has boring job at a marketing toothpaste company, and doesn’t seem to fit with her mean girl flatmates.
Given tough subject matter to work through, the chemistry between the pair is palpable, each giving wonderful, stirring performances. The film is almost a one-track mind in it’s focus on the couple, treating everyone and everything outside the relationship with an almost irreverent tone. With their friends obsessed with trash TV or getting drunk at parties, the cancer diagnosis throws the couple tumbling forward together, in a way only young love can, but Munroe and White treat it with so much honesty and compassion it’s as if they have been through the situation themselves.
Shotgun is an honest, whirlwind of a romance, where you know deep down, it’s not healthy, it won’t work out. And yet the film is a wh olly captivating watch, there’s real character and style in the direction, a new voice, bringing an honest, often heart-wrenching tone to what can be a very tried and tested genre.