Varient, Busted Buggy Entertainment,
Emily VanCamp, Michael Nyqvist, David Call, Michael Cristofer, Talia Balsam, Ana Mulvoy Ten
Alice is a 26 year old woman who works for a publishing company. She’s struggling with writer’s block and is not really able to handle relationships and finds herself a loner. When she is given the assignment to assist with the publishing of a novel for a well known writer, Milan Daneker (Michael Nyqvist), she recognizes him as an adult who molested her 15 years earlier, using her life and experiences as the main character in his first novel. She obviously has not dealt with the issue, and it seems to be the root of all the conflict and problems in her life, so 15 years later she is about to confront him with what he has done and make him own up to it.
This is a very interesting drama with quite a unique look at this kind of situation where an adult in a parental type relationship misuses and abuses a young person for their own personal gain. The story is told as a dual story showing us the young Alice (played remarkably by Ana Mulvoy Ten) and the older, still messed up Alice of today in a series of flashbacks to help us understand the entire story. It is hard to watch, as you want to reach through the screen and strangle this low life poor excuse of a human being, but yet you can see how it happened. Striving for success as a writer while destroying a young person’s life is inexcusable, but we try to see how it happened. Though not graphic, but very jarring, the subject is handled very tastefully. One of the nicer things of the film is that we don’t get to see the future and how it all works out, so we’re left with the hope that Alice somehow will be able to put this all behind her and move on. This is written very well, and the primary characters are very well developed. Though it’s hard to watch, you’ll find it interesting in a forbidden sort of way like an auto accident, you won’t want to watch, but you can’t help yourself. I think they did a very good job on this film, and it was disconcerting to watch, but gave me a lot to think about. Very well done. It was a pleasant surprise to find this film.
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