Plenty to look forward to in disturbingly twisted Aussie treat.
My first introduction to Rolf De Heer came with his Palme D’or nominated film called The Quiet Room about a girl who had trouble speaking. His newest picture seems like what 20 years of repression in a marriage would do to someone who never voices their opinion. This year’s answer to Basic Instinct explains why men should keep their vegetables on a kitchen plate instead of serving it up inside the bedroom. Steve’s birthday will be one of those days that he will most likely never forget, but surprise, surprise this is not a good thing. For the majority of picture, this is about the sweetest revenge plotted by Alexandra (Helen Buday) who fills the mind of her hubby Steve (Gary Sweet) with every possible degree of guilt, anger and confusion. After setting up the characters and the story, the film goes ahead with a full half –hour exchange between a man on a lazyboy chair, a remote control and his wife’s taped confession and quite surprisingly the viewer gets just as entangled into the twisted mind game giving us a best worst joke type of humor that I last felt from LaBute’s ruthlessness in In the Company of Men. Sweet’s armchair performance is great, his whole fiasco with a television remote reminds of the desperation of needing to know as in The Vanishing. Alexandra’s Project gives a whole new meaning to the idea of payback and is a highly original concept for a film especially since the ingenious idea would normally be a tough job to transfer into a film, but De Heer makes it work. What works so well for this film is how it keeps the viewer in the dark, from the beginning there is this tension that builds up from the creepy way in which the camera wraps along a suburban streets to the security-tight family home which reveals in small doses that the typical family with a macho patriarch will somehow get one hell of a punch to the stomach. Since the majority of the film takes place in one location, it allows De Heer to get a first-rate job on texturing the image with heavy atmospheric lighting to get the viewer in mood and without any other distractions it allows the viewer to put themselves in the shoes of both victims. Perhaps the nudity and the foul ideas will censor this Australian treat from playing widely, but of all the junk about the ultimate in revenge, this one gets it right and doesn’t even leave a spot of blood behind, but it will definitely leave an impression.
