Richard Crouse

“Never Saw it Coming,” based on the novel by Linwood Barclay, is a very dark comedy set against a backdrop of violence, murder and fraud.

Emily Hampshire is Keisha Ceylon, a con artist in an unhappy relationship who puts food on the table as a pseudo psychic. For a fee—always upfront—she preys on vulnerable families, offering phony information in outstanding missing person’s cases. An edgy character through and through, she even occasionally sets up a disappearance and later split the finder’s fee with a the supposedly disappeared person. When a consultation with Wendell Garfield (Eric Roberts), a wealthy man whose wife had vanished, takes a bad turn, Keisha discovers an even darker path in life.

Tightly constructed, “Never Saw it Coming” is a story about the lengths a person will go to survive, to provide for their family. Keisha’s morally dubious—to say the least—actions have unexpected results and that’s what keeps the story buoyant. In any other film Keisha would be the villain, or at the least, a very shady character not to be trusted. Here Hampshire infuses her with considerable charm, even when she is doing terrible things. She is one of the rare baddies you might just end up rooting for.

“Never Saw it Coming” isn’t a complicated tale. It’s an aptly named story that sees its main character thrown into a bad situation, ripe with violence and deceit, that provides enough twists to keep you guessing until the end credits roll.