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Reel People: Behold The Unseen

Director Geoff Redknap offers a new take on ā€œinvisible manā€ films in feature debut
Julia Sarah Stone appears in The Unseen, which screens Oct. 7 at VIFF.
Julia Sarah Stone appears in The Unseen, which screens Oct. 7 at VIFF.

You won’t find many ā€œinvisible manā€ tropes in The Unseen, the feature directorial debut from Āé¶¹“«Ć½Ó³»­filmmaker Geoff Redknap.

ā€œā€™Invisible man’ movies tend to be about gags, about hats floating around on people that you can’t see, and cutlery moving around, and we wanted to come up with a way that it would be fresh,ā€ says Redknap, whose new film screens Oct. 7 as part of the .

Redknap and producing partner Katie Weekley also had a more practical motivation for rejecting those age-old cinema tropes: they didn’t want to ā€œsearch for the perfect actor, cast the perfect actor, pay the perfect actor, and then not show him, which is a problem you have with invisible characters,ā€ says Redknap.Ā 

That led the duo to rethink the whole concept of invisibility. ā€œIt evolved to a progressive condition, rather than an instantaneous lab experiment gone wrong – or right, however you look at the movie,ā€ says Redknap.

So while you won’t see any floating spoons or levitating hats in The Unseen, you will bear witness as a man (portrayed by Rectify’s Aden Young) slowly disappears.

And this man – named Bob – isn't a mad scientist holed up in a spooky laboratory. He works in a sawmill, and he’s got an estranged teenage daughter (played by Julia Sarah Stone), a distraught ex (Camille Sullivan), and an unhappy drug dealer (Ben Cotton) all driving his actions and emotions.

For Redknap – a longtime director of short films with an even longer career as a special effects makeup artist on big budget projects like Star Trek Beyond and Deadpool – the experience of making the The Unseen was both satisfying and challenging.

ā€œMaking indie films is pretty much non-stop challenges, and I think if you’re not being challenged, you’re not trying hard enough,ā€ chuckles Redknap. ā€œIf it’s too easy, you should be trying harder, because you’re not pushing yourself.ā€

One of the elements that made The Unseen especially challenging – and especially sumptuous – was location, location, location.

Redknap and co. shot The Unseen over 23 days at multiple locations in Vancouver, Langley, Britannia Beach, Vernon, and Kelowna – including at a sawmill.

ā€œOne of our goals to give the film a higher production value was to be very aggressive about the number of locations we used,ā€ says Redknap. ā€œWe’re BC filmmakers, and I come from small town BC originally and I worked in sawmills, so that area was familiar to me, and I have a good friend who still works in the forestry industry and I hear his stories all of the time, so it was fuel for my writing.ā€

For his disappearing lead, Redknap sought out Young after enjoying the actor’s work on SundanceTV’sĀ Rectify.

Once it was public knowledge that Young was confirmed for the role, ā€œeverybody in town starting calling us – actors that were our first choices for roles that we hadn’t even approached yet, their managers were calling us – because he’s just that good an actor,ā€ says Redknap. ā€œActors know good actors, and they wanted to work with Aden.ā€

ā€œPretty much every filmmaker says, ā€˜our cast is amazing,’ but our cast really was amazing,ā€ adds Redknap.

See The Unseen for yourself Oct. 7 at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas. Tickets at

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