A Family of Two : A review of the movie 'Consent' , starring Troian Bellisario and Peter Vack

"Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

                                                                                                           - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.

He was a cheater. She was an alcoholic. He was hallucinating his dead sister. She was abused. They were a family.The movie "consent" pulls us into the lives of Susan and Mark and their children -Amand
and Joshua still reeling from the death of their eldest daughter Samantha. Her suicide throws the family into a downward spiral of drugs, abuse and inappropriate sexual conduct ,testing their relationships along the way.

While Mark keeps his mind off her death by philandering ,Susan finds solace in alcohol , Josh and Amanda are left to deal with the wreckage by themselves .By not paying the necessary amount of attention to them ,Susan and Mark grant their children the unspoken consent to behave in any way they like, which leads them into making some very damaging, destructive choices , especially true when it comes to Amanda who engages in a sadomasochistic relationship despite being advised against it by Josh repeatedly. Their mother chooses to relinquish any responsibility that she might feel towards them and their father is so involved in his extramarital affair that they have absolutely nobody to look upto. Josh tries to become this father figure  to Amanda that they clearly lost out on ,becoming a shoulder for her to cry on on various occasions,her only support system .He wants nothing more than to protect his little sister,the only family that he has left now.

                         Home does not bring a sense of comfort to them , instead this is where the chaos in their life stems from,the unsupervised teens substitute the void left by their sister's death and their parent's absence by indulging in all kinds of self destructive behavior .The word normal does not hold any meaning to them they try to adapt to their rapidly changing family situation as well as they can,leaning on each other for support .Josh and Amanda become a unit in themselves,a family within a family. The loss of this security blanket leads Amanda to look for some other "safe place" ,which ironically she thinks she finds in the arms of an abusive boyfriend .

                    Amanda seems to have accepted her sister's death much more readily than Josh who still sees Sam everywhere,she is for him what he tries to become  for Amanda ,an anchor to hold onto.We are given two contrasting views of what Sam was like, one from Josh who still remembers Sam kindly and one from Amanda who blames her for choosing to take the easy way out,a mere coward .Where Amanda doesn't seem to let anyone other than Josh in her life , Josh seems to welcome his best friend Seth into his closely guarded world who let's Josh in on his little secret too - he is a closeted gay boy who is too afraid to tell his military man father this because he fears he wouldn't be "calm about it", a subtle hint about what his family must be like.

                 
                   Josh wants to be a filmmaker and he finds his muse in Amanda ,he films her all the time,sometimes to the extent of being voyeuristic.His movie on her even gets him into film school ,she becomes more and more important to him as the movie progresses ,one of the only things he cherishes as much as his camera that he carries around everywhere with him .She dotes on him ,he becomes her only rescuer ,the only one who can truly understand what she is going through, close enough to not only watch but see who she really is. You start to understand why they become so close ,they only have each other,at this point in their lives.This is not a choice but a necessity ,pulling each other through is the only way they will ever make out of the mess that their lives have become.

                 The distant behavior of their parents is in contrast with the overly affectionate relation between Josh and Amanda and also between Josh and Samantha who he is clearly not  able to let her go of .As the movie progresses the question clearly is - how much affection is too much affection? The movie while always dark takes on a disturbing turn from here on ,choosing to portray incest  in a way that it seems almost justifiable ,understandable if not acceptable .After her boyfriend sexually abuses her at a friend's house Amanda comes home crying and turns to the only constant in her life ,her brother .Under the influence of drugs and alcohol the lines between the siblings  blur until Josh comes to his senses and pulls away. She slaps him, sobbing ,shouting that she hates him,both of them in tears now ,finally grieve - grieve the loss of  Sam, of their mother ,of their father,of themselves.

            Through flashbacks we know that the cracks in their relationships were already there right from the start ,Sam's death merely accelerated the unraveling of this family.Would it not have happened if she were alive? Or was it just a matter of time? Their family was never perfect.But then is any family ever ? Josh leaves for college , leaving behind Amanda and Sam.It is in this tender moment when they hug that we realise that even with everything that they have been through they managed to come off virtually unscathed , together and they always will as long as they have each other.