Tonight You’re Mine

Tonight You’re Mine sounds like a threat.  Ostensibly a free-wheeling indie romance, by the time the film reaches its climax, the implications of that threat come into full view – and it’s already grating beforehand.  Adam (Luke Treadaway) is the lead singer/token hot dude in a popular electro-pop duo called The Make, and Morello (Natalie Tena) is the singer/keyboardist in an all-girl punk group that does not resemble any form of punk, post-punk, hardcore, post-hardcore, or any variation thereof.  The bands are fake, but the music festival where the groups are performing, Scotland’s T in the Park, is not.  Within five minutes of the film’s opening, long before we have a chance to get to know who these people are, a mysterious festival worker handcuffs them together during an argument.

From here, the film meanders through poorly semi-improvised non-situations.  The feeling is akin to wandering up to a group of people and attempting to chat, but they never acknowledge your existence and continue to participate in their own established rapport and in-jokes.  It’s a distancing effect that doesn’t seem to have been intentional, and the fact that Adam and Morello’s romance feels more like emotionally violent sexual coercion probably wasn’t either.  Yes, Adam is a supreme creep who berates and alienates Morello’s banker boyfriend to the point that he takes off so he can have his way with her.  No, it’s not supposed to read like that, but the film’s explanation that the power of music brings them together doesn’t hold up.  Instead, Adam comes off as reprehensible and Morello an abuse victim.

That Tonight You’re Mine is chaotically disorganized and underwritten would make it a troubled but admirable experiment – the film was shot in a few days during the actual T in the Park festival of 2011.  That’s a bold way to produce a film, but Adam’s reprehensible behavior inadvertently turns this so-called romance into an ugly, discomforting mess.