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Tuesday, August 1, 2023

BACK ROADS (2018)

The Ancient Greek House of Atreus has nothing on the Modern South-East House of Altmyer.  Here, the originating sin is Dad’s sexual abuse of minors, his own kids, and his subsequent murder in 1993.  We know who was shot, but who pulled the trigger?  Is Mom covering for one of the abused kids (older son, three girls)?  Was Dad even the intended victim?  Revelations of past sexual abuse prove something of an enigma.  Did jealousy and a sick kind of sibling rivalry factor into the equation?  And how does it play out two years after the murder left the brother, barely out of his teens, attempting to keep family & home together by dropping out of school and taking on two jobs, only now finding love or some reasonable facsimile thereof with an older married neighbor.  A court appointed psychiatrist is on hand to help us parse relationships & sympathetically listen to exposition, but too much method mumbling keeps us from figuring out just how much transfer of familial guilt is flowing, figuratively or literally.  Alex Pettyfer, a good decade too old as head-of-the-household brother (he also wound up directing*), might be an interesting actor, but here you quickly lose patience with his Ashton Kutcher meets James Dean act.  And he can’t make sense for us of the final shooting, choosing to play martyr while we pretend that police forensics didn’t exist twenty years after QUINCY took to the airwaves.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *So far, a one-off for Pettyfer as director.  But in spite of trouble maintaining a sense of momentum at the film’s deliberate pace, he does make a few interesting choices.  None more so than in the oddly framed shots that open & close the film: typical reverse angle single shots between investigating cop and confessed criminal, but with each man purposefully positioned on the ‘wrong’ side of the frame.  It works!

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