There are many movies that make us question the film making decisions of the production team. Sometimes its the title such as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie being retitled to Don’t Open the Window for its release in the United States. Other times it can be a direction that the movie’s plot takes with seemingly no rhyme or reason.  When We Dance the Music Dies not only has both in spades but many more problems that they hoped flash over substance would solve. For a film that is a measly 62 minutes, it is baffling how it has so much padding.

Introducing the film are three young women who are preparing to play the “Elevator Ritual” which promises to take them to another world. The next morning Tom and Helen Walton receive a phone call from the police that their daughter Audrey, who was one of the girls performing the ritual, has gone missing. A year later Tom has let Audrey’s disappearance consume him as well as his marriage. After digging for more clues Tom begins to find out that there were parts of Audrey’s life he knew nothing about. Could a local cult leader Audrey had been writing to be responsible for her disappearance or will he lead Tom to get her back?

Spoiler Alert: The cult leader’s information leads nowhere and Tom just eventually gives up. For the most part, this film is a mystery where Tom is looking for Audrey and at the midway point, the cult leader agrees to meet Tom when he gets out of jail. When he does he commits suicide with his followers and his lawyer, who was promised a place in the cult, shoots Tom and then himself. After that, the last third of the film has Tom start dating Audrey’s friend Carol and just give up on the search for his daughter until he has an unearned change of heart and does the elevator ritual. The whole film and ending itself makes this movie feel so directionless and pointless when we see in the beginning how he would find Audrey and everything else is just padding for that conclusion.

As if a meandering plot wasn’t bad enough our lead protagonist is completely blank-faced for almost the entire film. Tom can’t even seem to emote when he receives news that his daughter is missing, that his wife is leaving him, or believably look like he is in a prison talking to a cult leader. Meanwhile, he is surrounded by actors that could have easily played his part if not better in every way. Catherine Mary Stewart who plays Helen Walton gives a wonderful performance as Tom’s wife for the 5 minutes she is in the film, just flip the script and make it her who is looking for Audrey. The worst part is there are moments where William Ragsdale is giving a good performance, and we’ve seen him give good ones in the past, so what happened to him in this film?

As one final kicker against the audience the title When We Dance the Music Dies, like all the events in the film, has no bearing on the overall plot and adds nothing to the story. I have had films that I actively hated while I was watching them due to distasteful messages, weak characters, or missed opportunities but the film just felt like a waste of my time. I finished the movie feeling like I have gained nothing in watching it. Not a new perspective on film making and not insight on myself or the world around me, I simply felt like I had watched people burn money on the screen and wrote a review about it.