Backtrack (2015)

This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Fantastic!

A Masterpiece!

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

At last an Australian Ghost story with a lot of atmosphere and an excellent cast. I must admit Academy Award winner Adrien Brody nailed his attempt at the Australian accent. Casting Adrien Brody, Sam Neill and Robin McLeavy should help international appeal and marketing.A ghost story about a grieving psychologist in Melbourne, Australia who is haunted by ghostly apparitions which make him search out his past in his rural home town.Excellent support cast includes Sam Neill, Robin McLeavy (The Loved Ones 2011), George Shevtsov, Jenni Baird, Chloe Bayliss, Bruce Spence (Mad Mad 2,3, Matrix Revolutions, Lord of the Rings) and Malcolm Kennard (Catching Milat). Great locations in Melbourne, Sydney, Carcoar and Oberon in country New South Wales.Robin McLeavy plays the role of a local rural cop with a sweet yet authoritative manner. Pure genius casting actor George Shevtsov as Adrien Brody's retired cop dad.Love the moody, atmospheric sets, photography and realistic special effects.I had never heard of the film and was lucky to pick it up by chance at my local public library. This is my first IMDb review in years. Sad to see the forums go.

A psychologist who recently lost his young daughter through an auto accident because of his own carelessness is shocked to realize all his patients and even the friend who referred them are deceased. Investigation reveals all were killed in a train accident happening in his home town when the psychologist was a teenager. His return to discover why he's being haunted forms the basis of this story.Though the beginning is somewhat slow-moving with several non-speaking scenes, perhaps showing the tedium of his existence, once the little girl called Elizabeth Valentine comes to his office, things begin to pick up. What started out as a psychological horror drama of a man haunted by the belief he caused his child's death changes to a suspense mystery as he discovers reports of the train accident and his own memories don't coincide and the ghosts are asking for a retribution other than his own memories can supply.This film was made in New South Wales so other than Adrien Brody and Sam Neill, most of the cast won't be recognizable to American audiences but it's well-acted and well-cast. Mr. Brody, whom I consider a very underrated and rarely-used actor, underplays his part with a relentless but non-histrionic resoluteness in determining exactly what happened. There are several "shock" scenes and a tricky plot which twists back upon itself before the final resolve.A good film for a Halloween night.

Adrien Brody has to be one of the least appealing actors in Hollywood. The man has a complete lack of charisma. You can have all the acting chops you want, but if you can't be entertaining (or even watchable) on screen then what is the point? Sadly, he was enough to ruin a movie that was otherwise right up my alley. The ghost plot point I could easily leave (and I'm not even sure it added much to the movie anyway), but the mystery/thriller side of things was actually very well crafted and disguised. Is Brody even that much of draw card to audiences these days? Has he turned in anything noteworthy in recent years? The film makers obviously thought so, flying him all the way to Australia to be the star of their film. When you do that and the guy turns out to be the one thing that ruins your movie, you'd have to be a little upset. The local actors actually quite impressed me and Sam Neill turned in his usual cool, calm and collected performance. There was potential for a very good thriller here. Disappointingly though, the end result is something pretty forgettable.

I came across this movie on Netflix streaming. The most glaring initial impression is that Brody speaks in such a whisper, especially during the first half of the movie, that you need to turn on the subtitles to grasp what he is saying. Set in Australia, the Psychologist is Adrien Brody as Peter Bower. He is despondent, his daughter had died recently in an accident on the street when Peter is distracted by something in a storefront window. The significance only comes to light at the end of the movie. This is a movie that requires viewing patience because things happen and we wonder if the story will go anywhere. But eventually it does and ends up being a worthwhile movie. SPOILERS: The whole story is set up some 20 years earlier when a train derailed near his small hometown. Peter and a friend had gone at night to spy at lover's lane, we see they lean their bikes against train tracks, and later a passenger train comes along, hits the bikes, and crashes to kill almost all on board. We think "Those bikes could not have caused that derailment" and we are correct, it was a faulty memory, suppressing what actually happened. To relieve his guilt Peter makes a report with the lady police chief. She is curious, as her mother had been one of the fatalities, looks up all old evidence and photos, corners Peter's dad, a cop back 20 years earlier, and all that leads to Peter's dad having been at lover's lane that night, he raped and murdered a girl Peter had been seeing as a ghost, Peter witnesses the struggling girl pull the track switch which actually caused the derailment. The dad then carried the dead girl and placed her among the dead in the train. That had been in Peter's subconscious all those years and seeing a similar toy track switching station in a store display window had distracted him when his daughter was killed. As the movie ends dad meets his own fate with a speeding train. A bit contrived, I must say.