Radioflash is a 2019 thriller about an electromagnetic pulse that kills power to more than 200 million people, leaving a teenage girl to help lead her family to survival in a dark new world.
Reese (Brighton Sharbino) is a smart girl, creative and inventive, working to build a competition-level virtual reality escape room, clearly knowing her way around modern technology. Her father, Chris (Dominic Monaghan), not so much, using the conveniences available at his fingertips but more appreciating an old school flare like flashlights and turntables. The two are still reeling from the loss of his wife – her mother – to cancer, but he’s nonetheless a proud father, highly supportive of his daughter’s techno pursuits even as he clings to an analog lifestyle. One night, while the two are enjoying a late dinner, the power suddenly shuts down, Reese realizing a little later on that it’s not a local event. When she gets in touch with her eccentric, survivalist grandfather Frank (Will Patton) via an old ham radio, she learns that the United States has been struck by an EMP blast and chaos is soon to sweep the soon-to-be devastated country. Now Reese and Chris must make it to him in the mountains before all is lost.
While this is highly familiar territory, writer and director Benjamin McPherson‘s feature length debut at least has some flare in giving the old story some style. That starts with a clever opener where Reese is stuck in a room with wall-mounted rotary phones, the place slowlying filling with water and she forced to find a way out. Where that goes, I’ll let you discover, but it’s a fun way to introduce the bright teenager without being to expositional. Sure, her father lives on the other side of the techno spectrum, as to be expected, but the story doesn’t waste much time in getting things moving, lowering the boom on a terrifying possibility and trying to play out what that might be like. That setup is smart and genuinely hook-worthy.
However, this isn’t a film about nerve-pinching stress or high anxiety, despite the premise, this more another story where the teenager is far smarter than her parent, quickly snapping the pieces together in figuring out what’s going on and what to do next. Frank is of course the sage in all this, having written about it years ago and spending most of his life preparing for such a thing, living in isolation with all kinds of listening devices in keeping track of who’s saying what to whom. When Chris has a car accident on the way up to the mountains, it puts he and Reese against the elements, offering more opportunities for his daughter to shine and Frank a chance to head out on search and rescue.
All that might have been sustainable, and indeed has the most impact, but that’s not where it stays, the story getting Reese caught up with Maw (Fionnula Flanagan), a backwoods ‘mother’ of a clan of uneducated followers, grinding much of the film’s momentum to a slow roll. It’s a curious choice, one that teeters a bit (for too long) into the hokey as Flanagan embraces the camp of it all. While the father/daughter relationship is strong, and both Sharbino and Monaghan earn points for some earnest performances, Radioflash doesn’t have the intensity or humanity it feels demanding of. Some fun moments and a headstrong young woman at the center of it help a lot and will surely appeal to the target audience, but this seems one step off where it should have gone.