The Book of Revelation (2006)

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

"A secret he would not share. An obsession he could not control. A mystery he dare not resolve." This is TBOR's "grand" tagline. The mystery and the secret aren't nearly as good as you'd hoped for. The movie's premise is just a big, empty promise that turns out to be a typical movie-poster lie.TBOR certainly works very well in the first 20-30 minutes, while the disappearance of the dancer is still a total mystery. Frankly, it should have stayed that way, because the "revelation" was a bit of a joke. Turns out Long was being raped and tortured by three young women. Is that it?, I thought. No mysterious cult, no aliens, no demons, no underground organization, no travelers from the past - just 3 horny women looking for perverted fun. How disappointing. I'd have preferred any of the just-mentioned clichés to this. However, even this puff-of-smoke "big secret" could have sufficed as a basis for a solid mystery/thriller. Alas, it isn't one. The filmmakers opted to turn this into a psychological drama. YAWN.Most of the movie is Long shooting in the dark as he tries to find his female captors. The worst part is that he fails. Even worse than that, WE the viewers never find out anything more than he does. The film ends with cop Friels telling Long to "start from the beginning". What a scam; it's the sort of cop-out ending (with a cop, no less) that almost anyone can come up with. To cop out during the writing process is the easiest solution. The hard option is to actually rack your brains, trying to come up with a unique or interesting twist, or at least a story with a beginning, middle and end. This is definitively an example of very lazy writing. And how does one mask lazy writing? One calls it a "psychological, meditative drama with a message". It's always easy to fool the sheep; after all, the likes of Picasso and Bunuel have been doing it for years. Create nothing and then rationalize it with empty semantics and other well-improvised nonsense. Art in its very nature offers a great opportunity for charlatans to exist in it. It takes a clear and unpretentious head to weed out the crap.Of course a woman would direct and co-write a movie about women who rape a man. It's a role-reversal thing-a-ma-jig sorta deal, like, don't you know? Very deep, like, socially relevant, like, message, that is meant to, like, make us think a bit about the role of women in society and stuff, like, guyeee. The whole victim thing put upside down on its blonde head, like, wow! So deep and stuff. Feminist power!Tom Long is pretty good in the lead role, though. He vaguely resembles the young Malcolm McDowell. There are several actresses from the terrible TV drama series "The Secret Life Of Us" (the hospital nurse and the aborigine girl), which the director was also involved in, plus Nina Liu who starred in a 90s teen Aussie series. This Liu is very attractive and should have been given a bigger role in the movie.Speaking of Liu, if one is to place suspicion on anyone, it's her. She had left Long, just as he was sent to pick up cigarettes. But what's the point in speculating? Clearly, the filmmakers themselves have no clue, i.e. haven't decided who the perpetrators are, so why bother. The end-credits state that one of the three robed women was played by none other than the actress who plays Long's girlfriend. But I'm sure this was merely the director saving money by using a person to play two roles. After all, there is no way that Long could fail to recognize his girlfriend's eyes, voice, breasts, or legs for entire 12 days; they'd been together for 3 years before his abduction.I didn't think that the pornographic nature of some of the scenes was necessary for the story. I believe this choice had more to do with the director's own sexual fantasies and living them out on the screen than anything else that she might come up as an excuse with - something undoubtedly very "deep". Charlatan.In fact, the TV series "The Secret Life Of Us" (no secrets there, though) which Kokkanis also worked on has a barely concealed strain of anti-male sentiment throughout it. This leads me to speculate that the female director particularly enjoyed filming the vibrator-rape scene. Did she drool while filming it? I have no idea what the title of the movie has to do with anything.Still, an Aussie drama without a left-wing political message. That doesn't happen very often these days...

Apologies to other reviewers here who find terms like "brave" and "courageous" unhelpful - Book of Revelation was all of those things to me, and much more.This film took perhaps the most difficult subject I have seen raised in cinema - male rape and torture by a group of women - and confronted it. From its original source material to its script to its director to its casting - to say nothing of its final audience - it was never going to please everyone. Nor was it going to be perfect. But it sure as hell raised the profile of its subject matter and made its audience think.It is not easy to review in detail, but it certainly is easy to say: seek it out and watch it. Its difficult to watch in places, but it is important both for its subject and as an example of film making. It's director is innovative and always interesting. It's cast is great. It's score ... despite some comments here ... is excellent.I won't provide plot details, there are enough of them in the surrounding reviews. I would like, though, to point out that the original novel was extraordinarily powerful, the technique of a first person narrative with the exception of the section about his captivity (which reverts to third person and so takes us outside the victim's mind) working very well. While this could not be transferred to a screenplay I think the remnants of it are responsible (for some reviewers) for patches of seemingly stilted dialogue where the internal monologue was removed.In regard to the issues of Daniel and his abductors, the book differed somewhat. Although little was given from their point of view, I found the relationships Daniel built with them very important. I regret not only that these were hardly touched upon in the screenplay but that the length of his captivity (which created a longer environment for those relationships to form) was significantly reduced. I would have liked to have seen more of what he experienced in captivity and his dialogues with his abductors utilized, although I can understand why this would have been very tricky. To show the further tortures and sexual assaults he endured - and upped the sensual nature of his captors - may well have made the film unbearable for many, as well as increased the "pornographic" element for those who have sadly seen the film in those terms.But these are small issues in a very powerful film. I found his psychological damage - and the ways (both negative and positive) he dealt with that damage - very realistically portrayed. Why reviewers worldwide have sought - and criticized the film for not revealing - the motives of his abductors amazes me. When are the motives for sexual assault ever given? You get along with your life without knowing them. To me the gender element became almost irrelevant: it was Daniel's journey during and after his captivity which captured, and continues to haunt, me.Sincere congratulations and commendations to all involved.

This is not your typical Australian movie, despite its government funding. It could have come from a European art-house director and its location in Melbourne seems incidental (I think the original book by Rupert Thomson was set in Amsterdam). It is also not a movie for the nervous – at times it is very tense indeed and the cutting and soundtrack seem designed to keep the audience on edge. As Daniel the male dancer abducted and sexually abused by three hooded women, Tom Long gives an intense, if slightly monolithic, performance. Daniel's lines give him little scope for expressing his feelings, it is only in dance that he can do that, and the rest of the time he acts rather than thinks. On the other hand his physical appearance dominates the film – we are seeing essentially his view of things.The abuse scenes were not as bad as I had feared, and were relatively short. They were pornographic, I think, only to people like the hooded women. And here's the problem. A handsome heterosexual man captured by three young women and forced to have sex with them? No wonder the cops laugh when Daniel tries to tell them what happened. What is it about Daniel that moves them to do this? He was not chosen at random. He's a fit accomplished young male dancer, someone of physical beauty and grace. Why do these women need to humiliate and degrade him? No doubt the director Ana Kokkinos wants us to ask this question but we are not provided with many clues towards an answer. All we are told by the hooded ones is that "it is for our pleasure". Well, if they are sadists, I suppose it makes sense but I don't think it tells us anything about relationships between men and women generally.Even so, the whole thing is pretty well done, and we do get a very clear picture of the devastating impact abuse of this nature can have on a person. The revelation, I suppose, is Daniel's loss of both innocence and self-regard. Ana Kokkinos proved in "Head On" that she can mix atmosphere and action though this film is quieter overall. Tom Long gets good support from Greta Scacchi, never better, as his dancing mistress, and Colin Friels gives a quiet and convincing portrait of an understanding policeman ( a very rare beast). As Daniel's girlfriend, Anna Torv's performance is curiously flat – her character is underwritten and her impassive good looks convey little but emptiness. Deborah Mailman also puts in a good performance in a small role as the girl who helps Daniel recover from his ordeal. But the portentous (or is it pretentious) atmosphere dissolves to a banal ending, almost on the same level as a "Twisted Tale" (a Channel 9 TV series of mordant but slight stories) – the motivation for a routine assault is explained.The screening I saw was sparsely attended and I don't think this film will do well, which is a pity. Ana Kokkinos is a talented filmmaker and it would be interesting to see what she could do with more mainstream material. Art-house Street can be a bit of a cul-de-sac.

Here's a couple of paragraphs out of an essay I wrote for university about TBOR."The Book of Revelation is an erotic thriller about sex, power and a talented dancer's struggle to regain his sense of self after being unfortunately raped by three cloaked women. The three women that violate him all have distinctive marks on the bodies; one has a giant birth mark on her buttocks, another has a butterfly tattoo on her lower stomach and the ring leader has a small circle on her breast. So he lives his new life in search of these markings, and to find them on these intimate places he does what any sane man does when he needs to see as many naked women as possible to solve a mystery, he has sex with them. An hour and ten minutes into the film and you feel like he has almost had a piece of every woman in Melbourne.The film is a giant chunk of pretentious celluloid; it is like grandiloquence drips from every frame. At only one point towards the films final climax does Kokkinos give a scene the same energy and strength as her debut feature Head On had in droves. As like many films funded by the government bodies the film takes it self way to seriously, the script and its execution appear to be chores rather then gifts and unfortunately for the talented thespians, their brilliant performances (particularly Tom Long as the fractured protagonist) are stuck within the confines of a pompous wan k fest."