POINTS: 5
Peter Bower (Adrien Brody) is a psychiatrist whose little daughter died not long ago in an accident in which he acted somewhat negligently. He and his wife are still grieving the loss and move to a different city to start over. Too bad Peter is now starting to see ghosts who try to make him remember something he’s blocked from his memory — you may guess there’s a horrible secret lurking in the past and Peter doesn’t seem to keen on confronting it. At the same time, he realizes there’s something way wrong with all his new patients: they may not even exist at all. They may be, in fact, ghosts too. So if that’s the case, what do all these different ghosts really want from him?
Written and directed by Michael Petroni, Backtrack belongs to that type of film that asks you to believe certain things only to make you doubt them afterwards, and then finally to wonder once again whether you were right or wrong in your assumptions. By the time the movie is over and you know exactly what happened in the past and how that triggers the consequences of the present, it all makes sense — poetic justice included — and there are no annoying plot holes that shake the plausibility of the story. It can be a bit far-fetched, that’s true, but as long as it makes sense within the story’s own logic, then that’s not a real problem.
Also on the plus side, there’s Adrien Brody’s moderately convincing performance in a role that’s pretty generic and at times underwritten. For that matter, the performances in general are just fine — including the good and old Sam Neill. And cinematography, sound and editing are professionally executed also.
But sadly, Backtrack is not the film that it could’ve been. Not that it could’ve been a groundbreaking landmark in horror cinema — not at all. But had the scares, special effects and tension been a bit above average, then it would’ve been moderately enjoyable from beginning to end. Broadly speaking, you could say it’s both a supernatural thriller and a horror feature, and while the thriller part does have its assets, the truth is that the horror/supernatural part is poorly conceived and executed.
So each time you run into a scare that’s not scary, ghosts that are risible, overused thumping sounds, and cheap thrills of all kinds to make you jump off your seat — and the truth is you don’t jump at all — then that’s when Backtrack wears thin, time and again. By the end you realize there was a good, even if unoriginal, story to be told, but only half of it got done. And you only got half of it done. And you are most likely to remember the eerie and chilling Don’t Look Now, by Nicholas Roeg — which won’t do any good for Backtrack or Michael Petroni.
production notes
Ellos vienen por ti / Backtrack (Australia, 2015) Written and directed by Michael Petroni. With Adrien Brody, Sam Neill, Robin McLeavy, Bruce Spence, Jenni Baird, Chloe Bayliss, Anna Lise Phillips, Olga Miller.Cinematography: Stefan Duscio. Editing: Martin Connor, Luke Doolan. Produced by Michael Petroni, David Evans. Running time: 91 minutes.
