Like Minds

Like Minds is a murder mystery that relies heavily on the elliptical machinations 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 endlessly 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 Redmayne), 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 Anglo-Saxon lore in what a kind of Harry Potter story cross-fertiized with 'The Da Vinci Code'.

An Australian-UK co-production helmed by Australian writer/director Gregory J. Read, Like Minds 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 unease. Collette is winning as the sympathetic psychologist whilst Redmayne, 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 and in the flashbacks Sturridge is a disturbing presemnce

Read's inexperience does show in the later stages 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 in order to get us to a resolution that, to say the least, is credulity stretching (when it was released in Australia in late 2006 it sank rapidly out of sight). Nevertheless as a debut feature Like Moms is an impressively stylish achievement.

 

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