There’s not quite such a Canadian sounding movie like Victoria Day, Why, there should even be some kind of hockey game at the beginning the film just so the filmmakers can prove how Canadian they really are right off the top. What? There is. Well, good thing because I was starting to wonder. But while it’s Canadian to a fault, Victoria Day is no ordinary Canadian movie. Taking place in Toronto on the week leading up to the May long weekend in 1988, it’s safe to say that Victory Day has more in common with something like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, than it does with Bob & Doug or Degrassi.

Ben Spektor (Mark Rendall) is a gifted high school hockey player and a huge fan of Bob Dylan. On the Sunday before the long weekend, he and two of his pals (John Mavrogiannis and Scott Beaudin) go to the Dylan concert at Ontario Place where he runs into a fellow hockey team member, Jerry, who asks Ben for five bucks to buy some “really good drugs.” Ben gives him the money reluctantly, but doesn’t think too much of it as he walks into the concert. But the next day, Jerry doesn’t show up for school, or practice, and soon a full-blown manhunt is on. Meanwhile, Ben ponders if he might have played some small role in Jerry’s disappearance, and loses a piece of his remaining innocence in the process.

Victoria Day has a very naturalistic feel to it. From the acting to the way its shot, the film just kind of floats gently by with style and grace. Rendall is pretty good and plays the confused teen nicely. You can see the confusion and the inner struggle in his face, an inner conflict saying that he’s stuck in a place between childhood and adulthood. In the midst of Jerry’s disappearance, Ben finds himself getting closer to Jerry’s sister Cayla (Holly Deveaux), whom it’s alluded to that he’s had a crush on for some time. The kind of connection that Ben develops with Cayla is something that wouldn’t have happened had her brother not disappeared, so how do you react to that? That’s probably a situation no one’s equipped to deal with, but when you’re already caring around the guilt of giving the guy the fiver that may have caused his disappearance in the first place, is another mind trip altogether.

But these moments are actually few and far between. There’s so much about Victoria Day that’s actually fairly pedestrian. Like Ben’s Russian parents, his dad (Sergiy Kotelenets) both hands off and fairly obsessive about Ben using his hockey prowess to garner himself a promising future. If there’s one parental character that would be much more interesting to spend time with it’s Jerry’s father Ira (Jeff Pustil), who struggles with his son’s disappearance in a fog of not knowing what to do or what he could be doing, but holding up hope just the same, no matter how thin it is. Pustil is really great to watch and utterly heartbreaking in a subtle way. I’ve never seen an understated role carry so much emotion.

The film’s tag line “Life changes in a flash,” is apropos, but when the credits roll it seems that there’s something left out of the equation. Indeed, the film ends so suddenly you can barely believe it at first. Moreover, the film feels like it ends at the second act and there’s a whole other section of the film left to play out. It’s kind of jarring and it doesn’t give the film any kind of resolution whether factual or emotional. There’s only a wistful feeling that maybe something’s been lost along the way. It’s powerful stuff, or at least it could have been. I just don’t think that writer/director David Bezmozgis pushed it as far as he could have. It’s like he was working so hard at playing it cool, that the film becomes passive and sometimes forgets to engage. Still, it’s an interesting film thanks to a couple of keen performances and some gentle Canadian nostalgia.