Like Minds Film Review: Cinephilia - Australian Film & more

Like Minds is a thriller that relies heavily on the elliptical convolutions of its plot but unlike slick American films of its kind such as the roughly contemporaneous The Wrong Man (2005) offers a good deal more than endlesssly escalating narrative twists and turns.

Toni Collette (who was an executive producer) plays a forensic psychologist called in by Detective McKenzie (Richard Roxburgh,) to assess the case of Alex (Eddie Radmayne), a seventeen-year-old public school boy charged with the murder of a fellow student Nigel (Tom Sturridge). Told largely in flashback by Alex the story descends into the dark recesses of occult Anlgo-Saxon lore, a kind of Harry Potter story gone very weird with a body count to match. An Australian-UK co-production helmed by Australian writer/director Gregory J. Read it is set in Yorkshire largely in the cold stone corridors of Alex’s upper class boarding school and shot in lugubrious blues and greys by DOP Nigel Bluck. Steven Jones-Evans’s production design is right on the money and Carlo Giacco’s music contributes effectively to the sense of Gothic foreboding. Collette is winning as the sympathetic psychologist whilst Eddie Radmayne, in his first feature film performance is equally impressive in keeping us in two minds as to whether or not he is telling the truth. Read’s inexperience does show in the later stages particularly when it comes to handling the action sequences and some will want to question the extraordinary incompetence of Roxburgh’s thick-headed detective work (or lack of it) on which the narrative heavily relies. Nevertheless as a debut feature film this is an impressive achievement. Perhaps too dark for a mainstream audience, too cerebral for a horror audience, somewhat surprisingly, when it was released in Australia in late 2006 it sank rapidly out of sight. BH

DVD Extras: Audio commentary from director Greg Read and composer Carlo Giacco.

DVD available from: Magna Pacific

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