"The central protagonists in this short 100 minute drama explore all encompassing lust, love, jealousy and hate"

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, in particular Homer’s telling of Odysseus’ fabled journey home in the Odyssey, the journey has featured as an integral part of storytelling. Combine that with the adage, “Art imitating life” and you have a fitting description for Trap for Cinderella. Trap for Cinderella has been a twelve year long journey or odyssey for writer-director Iain Softley in which time he has crafted a story in which art imitates life.

But is Trap for Cinderella in reality Trap for Softley, caught within his own web of obsession – a twelve year long journey or odyssey for the writer-director - literally “Art imitating life.” But out of this long gestation period can the stalwart Softley craft a film that justifies his twelve year obsession with the adaptation of Sébastien Japrisot’s novel?

At its heart Trap for Cinderella is a tale about women, which encompasses the potential complexity of the most obsessive female relationships, and there we have the key word: obsessive.

The central protagonists in this short 100 minute drama explore all encompassing lust, love, jealousy and hate. Softley hangs his coat upon the complex emotional and volatile feelings of the relationship, one which draws to mind a spiral of chaos depicting with a share of both divided optimism and cynicism the destructive nature of relationships. Trap for Cinderella toys with the distinction between love and lust; affection and obsession.

Look beyond the title character and the protagonists and you will see the Cindarella story ensnared in a trap, disfigured and transformed into what is best described as a radical re-imagining. In Softley’s film Cinderella is not the meek and innocent young girl we are accustomed to seeing appear on stage or on screen.

True it is there are few if any perfect relationships to be found in drama, the characters and the story painting dark and light shades, Softley intrigued by the greyer shades which keep the two at an uncomfortable distance; the greyer shades the space of drama. Dark and light merely the bookends.

Trap for Cinderella is an example of aspiration over realisation. Whilst it should succeed at being a more compelling drama it succeeds in being, it struggles to convince that this compares to the Softley’s confident alien-human drama K-PAX.

Unlike K-PAX, Trap for Cinderella’s weakness is its dependence on Tuppence Middleton’s Mickey and Alexandra Roach’s Do to anchor the material. K-PAX struck the right chord in balancing performance and story. Therein Bridges and Spacey were required only to enhance the material rather than to elevate it above its merit. Whether it was the fault of the narrative for its inevitable failings or whether the polarities of Do’s naïve innocence and Mickey’s cold demeanour with a propensity for cruelty were to blame, throughout much of its 100 minute running time Trap for Cinderella invoked a sense of simmering frustration.

Perhaps such frustration derives from the realisation that all the ingredients are there: the thematic devices of memory and the search for a lost identity; the separation of truth from fiction; the filling in of past events and the complex tangled web of relationships that twist and turn, one twist leading into another where we ourselves find ourselves ensnared in a trap where everything before us is distorted. Watching Trap for Cinderella is comparable to the experience of waking from a dream only to discover you are in fact still dreaming; the fog clearing only an illusion created by the mind.

It is unfortunate that Softley overreaches, forcing the narrative twists to the point of the ludicrous. One twist in particular towards the end, a twist that is the key stone of the narrative descends the film into the realm of the nonsensical, betraying its none so subtle presence to propel the film towards its conclusion, and betraying the dictatorial hand of the writer-director. This one singular plot twist betrays a conflict between writer and story, the latter forced into a submissive role in which the themes are effective, but are let down by the overarching story, forced into an unnatural and undesirable mould. There is an expression every writer will have heard and which explains a fundamental truth Softley tried to unsuccessfully circumvent “Story is boss.”

In closing the performances from Alexandra Roach and Tuppence Middleton elevate Trap for Cinderella above the merits of the material. Softley creates what is for the most part an entertaining enough tale of the relationship between women, laced with a darkness found in his exploration of obsession, manipulation and platonic and romantic affection. Whilst the twists and the turns are well placed to exploit the theme of identity, Softley does find himself caught in his own web of deceit, one twist in particular, and a crux of the narrative crossing over into absurd rationale.