12/22/2023 0 Comments Backtrack 2015![]() Certainly, Michael Petroni writes these scenes far superior to the usual plotting in creating a detective story that gradually peels off layers of what happened and pieces together clues from Brody’s memory. It was not written for sensationalism but for the story itself which is. It becomes the standard ghost story stuff and follows familiar paths involving the dead reaching out to those in the present to find closure. Backtrack combines the paranormal with mystery in a suspenseful plot twist. These scenes are about Adrien Brody uncovering a mystery from the past. ![]() Thereafter though, about the half-hour point, once Adrien Brody returns to his hometown, the film becomes less interesting. This is an amazing hook for a film and creates something fascinating. The train that runs by the window of Adrien Brody’s office, for instance, comes increasingly closer until he can look up and see right inside a lit-up carriage filled with his dead patients as it goes by. He has this way of using a combination of architectural, camera set-ups and coloured lighting schemes to frame actors with striking effect. Throughout these scenes, Petroni’s directorial effect has become increasingly more surreal. Haunted psychologist Adrien Brody (r) and his mentor Sam Neill (l) He is unable to work out why the patients would have come recommended by mentor Sam Neill only to realise that he too is a ghost. Then comes the mysterious introduction of what Brody realises is a ghostly girl and the jolt when patient Anna Lise Phillips announces “I’ve realised why I can’t kill myself is because I’m already dead,” after which Brody starts to become aware that all of his patients are dead. Petroni’s directorial style is cool and measured. Backtrack (2015) Starring Adrien Brody, Sam Neill, Bruce Spence, Robin McLeavy, Jenni Baird, Anna Lise Phillips. (He also delivers a reasonably convincing Australian accent too). Brody is capable of being a fine performer when he wants to – even if he has never quite done anything that has stood up again like his Oscar-winning work in The Pianist (2002) – and gets the manner and detached friendliness of a psychologist down just right. We follow Adrien Brody as he goes to work as a psychologist and deals with various patients. Petroni’s feature-length directing-writing debut came with Till Human Voices Awake Us (2002), which has a similar plot to this in the story of a man returning to his home town and encountering a ghostly presence of a forgotten tragedy. Petroni has delivered the scripts for films such as The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (2002), Queen of the Damned (2002), Possession (2008), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Dawn Treader (2010), The Rite (2011) and The Book Thief (2013), as well as created the short-lived paranormal investigator tv series Miracles (2013) and the tv series Messiah (2020). “Backtrack” is like a layer-cake of those, a conceit that has the upside of keeping the viewer engaged with trying to puzzle out the story’s deeper truths, but the downside of recalling too many other movies that have played similar games in more startling and innovative ways.Backtrack was the second directorial outing from Michael Petroni who has had reasonable success on the international stage as a screenwriter. Psychiatrists speak of “screen memories,” uncomfortable (and often false) recollections that disguise more deeply painful actual memories. There are several further levels of discovery (and mounting horrors) beneath the ones described above, such that every guilty secret in the story seems to hide other, more drastic ones under it. Could they have had something to do with it? And why doesn’t he get any help with his investigations from his surly, alcoholic dad William (George Shevtosv), who was the police chief assigned to investigate the crash? Bower was a teen in 1987 and he and a friend were out spying on a Lover's Lane near the train tracks when the accident happened. Looking at newspaper clippings about the accident leads Bower to the realization that there’s a connection between his recent caseload and the train’s list of passengers, which included one Elizabeth Valentine. Though he has blocked the memory from his mind, that was the year when 47 people were killed in a horrific train wreck outside the town. (The dead daughter motif will remind some of Nicolas Roeg’s far creepier “Don’t Look Now.”) Duncan readily grasps the sign that this tragedy and Bowen’s current perplexities are connected: Elizabeth Valentine’s initials contain Evie’s name.īefore long, the mounting weirdnesses he faces propel Bower back to his small hometown, where all the previous references to 1987 begin to add up. ![]() Not too long before, his little daughter Evie was killed in a roadway accident when he was momentarily distracted. Even before their first conversation takes place, we learn that Bower is staggering through life carrying a heavy load of guilt. Troubled, Bower seeks advice from his friend and psychiatric mentor Duncan (the venerable Sam Neill).
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