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Plot synopsis
Matt's a management consultant for one of the country's best consulting
firms. His job essentially involves advising big corporations on where
to cut costs and save their businesses -- which in concrete terms,
translates to deciding who in the company should get canned. Where Matt
and his team of cocky Harvard- and Stanford-educated MBAs go, job losses
follow, which makes them kind of hated. But for the most part, Matt
doesn't mind; the job's challenges make it rather fun, and besides, he
gets paid a crapload of money for it. Then one day, after yet another
argument with his pseudo-leftist, freeloading, but very beautiful
girlfriend, he steps out into the street and smack into a moving car.
The accident leaves him with a serious concussion, and while physically,
he seems to recover just fine, his brain just doesn't seem to work quite
as well as it used to. His memory's not as sharp, his attention's
scattered, he's not quite acting like his old self. His company tells
him to take some time off, but when the short break turns into months,
he's terminated -- although his boss insist it's just a formality, and
he can come back whenever he's ready. Meanwhile, the girlfriend's dumped
him, his mom's constantly calling to check up on him, and he spends all
his time sleeping in his depressingly empty apartment. As he tries to
figure out what to do next with his life, Matt turns to all sorts of
unlikely places, including a New Age healer and her guru, as well as a
gawky East German physicist post-doc named Monica.
Review
So, let's get the obvious criticisms out of the way straight from the
beginning, because it's what you'll notice first when you start watching
Post Concussion. This is low, low, low-budget filmmaking here,
and it generally looks and sounds it. The acting often feels like an
amateur's notion of what acting is supposed to be like, and the
narration that guides the storyline sometimes seems like a copout way to
tell the tale. That the movie's not perfect is fairly indisputable --
but slowly, surely, all that starts not to matter. For all its rough
edges, Post Concussion actually has something interesting to say,
and it does so in a voice that's appealingly idiosyncratic and
distinctly personal. The story is based on writer/director/lead actor
Daniel Yoon's real-life experience of sustaining a serious head injury
that caused him to lose his high-paying job and re-evaluate what he
really wanted to be doing with his life. In the hands of Hollywood, it
undoubtedly would have turned into a maudlin, manipulatively feel-good
flick, but Yoon's movie is refreshingly free of sentimentality. There's
a lot of humor milked out of Matt's predicament, serious head injury and
all, and Yoon never lets the film get too precious about the idea of
figuring out what's really important to oneself. The end result is a
thoroughly charming, very amusing little movie that's an
honest-to-goodness affirmation of life, without all the touchy-feely
pretense.
—reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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