I can appreciate the big swings, even when I feel more of the breeze then anyone hoped.

While it’s hard not to get behind the big and beautiful ideas that Wisteria is putting on display in this story about true love transcending time and space, a good chunk of it unfolds as unwittingly clunky and unintentionally creepy.

The film follows Alana, a woman whose life is shattered by the death of her husband Jack. Ten years later, she becomes convinced that a gifted young violin prodigy may be the reincarnation of her lost love. Determined to uncover the truth, she embarks on a journey that challenges her understanding of life, death and destiny.

One can certainly make the argument that Wisteria is a testament to the core need for human connection that we all have, but it makes some broad and awkward leaps to get us where it wants us to be.

Writer/Director Nina Moscone Marrese going full steam ahead here into some pretty heady material, especially considering that this is her first time in the director’s chair.  We can’t knock ambition since some of the headier stories and films in the modern canon deal with the eternal nature of love and it crossing the ethereal boundaries, but it never lines up as neatly as you’d hope.  There’s ultimately a lot of chafe here in a story that may have been better served as a long format short rather than a feature.

We know what the film is trying to say, and we can appreciate it but as we have to navigate the awkward ideas of a grown woman stalking a child and subsequent events around it, it’s hard to be invested in a love story, when some borderline creepy stuff is going on because this woman (our lead character) is unhinged with grief for her husband that she lost 10 years ago.

The lead actors do their best but ultimately everyone is a little wooden as they navigate the abundance of material and awkward plot points that never really allows anyone to get to the crux of it all until the last ten minutes of the movie.

Ultimately; Wisteria loves ‘love’, which is an idea we’ll always be able to get behind, but it needed to trim some of the chafe and the unwittingly uncomfortable beats in the movie so that its core message could have a chance to truly shine.

As far as first features go, we can actually see the potential in what Nina Moscone Marrese can bring to the screen, but needs to be reined in, just a little bit.

It’s nice to swing for the home run, but sometimes you only need a base hit to win the game.

Wisteria is playing an exclusive run in Toronto at the Imagine Cinemas Carlton.