Backtrack
Awake or asleep, sometimes it makes little difference, the nightmare continues. The death of their daughter Evie has affected Peter and Carol Bower in different ways, but it has hit both of them hard. She awakens every morning in tears, whereas the damage to him is less obvious but undeniable, moving through his life in a fog, unable to help his wife, unable to even say his daughter’s name, unable to help his patients.
There is Felix (The Return of the King‘s Bruce Spence), the jazz musician, whom he believes to be suffering from amnesia, convinced that it is still the late eighties and Ronald Reagan is president of the United States. There is Erica (Animal Kingdom‘s Anna Lise Phillips) who feels invisible, who asks Peter whether she is boring him when his attention drifts during a session.
Then there is the frightened teenage girl who arrives unannounced and unaccompanied by either parent or guardian, too terrified to even speak, instead handing him her train pass for identification – Elizabeth Valentine. When he turns his back, she vanishes into the night, Peter catching a glimpse of her through the blinds as she flees across the rain-soaked street below.
The therapist in therapy, Peter describes the oddity of the encounter to his friend Duncan Stewart who points him towards the rational explanation of his own grief manifesting, the girl’s initials echoing the unspoken name of his late daughter Evie, but a note left behind by her leads Peter to a realisation a connection between all his patients, one of whom lived in his home town and supposedly died there almost thirty years previously.
With the setup suspiciously close to an inversion of The Sixth Sense, a psychologist who discovers all his patients are dead (the question is never asked who is paying their no doubt hefty bills), the presence of Sam Neill as confidante Duncan automatically triggers a suspicion that he may not be acting in the best interests of the protagonist, his genial demeanour having concealed darker motives on many previous occasions, most prominently in Omen III: The Final Conflict and Event Horizon.
Unsurprisingly for an Oscar winner, Splice‘s Adrien Brody is convincing as the increasingly distraught Peter, trying to put together the fragments of his childhood memories, though this in fact a role he has performed previously when he donned The Jacket, and he is ably supported by the rest of the ensemble, particularly Australian character actor George Shevtsov as Peter’s father William and Hell on Wheels‘ Robin McLeavy as Barbara Henning, a police officer who becomes involved in his enquiries.
Written and directed by Michael Petroni who previously scripted Queen of the Damned and The Rite, his only previous directorial experience was the 2002 drama Till Human Voices Wake Us, and this practical inexperience with genre is telling, the story unfolding in an overly pensive manner which only gives the audience greater time to consider the too-apparent influences such as the guilt driven aberrant behaviour of The Machinist and the urge for penitence for youthful misdeeds of Flatliners.
With obvious jump scares and woefully amatuer digital effects and the revenge-driven ghosts moving beyond Peter’s perception as the film approaches its dénouement to actively participate in the action in a painfully trite deus ex machina, it is likely that Backtrack would have been a far superior film had it just been crafted as a psychological rather than a supernatural thriller.
Backtrack is now on limited release
