Backtrack (2015)

Just perfect...

I saw this movie before reading any reviews, and I thought it was very funny. I was very surprised to see the overwhelmingly negative reviews this film received from critics.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Dr. Peter Bower (Adrien Brody) laments and blames himself over the death of his daughter Evie (Emma O'Farrell). He accepts a job in Sydney doing psychological assessment. He discovers his patients all have one thing in common, something which forces him to return home and remember an event from over 20 years ago.Adrien Brody appears to have been typed cast into roles of a gloomy individual. He plays a pathetic individual not knowing what is happening to him, someone who sees ghosts. The film never develops into a real horror in spite of a few attempts to have a scary ghost scene. It is described as a mystery/thriller with the thriller side being light and half of the mystery revealed in the film trailer. The mystery peels itself back like an onion skin, never giving us enough clues to go beyond the next level.While I enjoyed watching the film, it is not one I would watch again.

Very pleasantly surprised. Adrien Brody just delivers a genuinely believable performance. This thriller mystery is not to be mistaken as a horror but that doesn't mean there are no jumpy scenes ! which I might add are perfectly timed to give the goose bumps. Decent directing unveiling the plot at a steady pace to stay mysterious yet kept the mind ticking. No spoilers just watch it, you will be entertained. RG

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.

Maybe I was in one of my rare good moods, but there could've been worse ways to spend 90 minutes than watching Backtrack. Yes, I did think the movie plodded along slowly, but given what it was supposed to be - an atmospheric thriller - it did that well, so I can't complain.Technically, this film has been made before in some other kind of iteration so the reveal wasn't that surprising. The music carried the movie well as did the acting; it only falls into cliché land with some of the more predictable ghostly elements, something that's very common in Korean films these days.The movie wasn't a waste of time. Is it a must see? Not really; there isn't really anything here you've never seen before. I just thought that watching it didn't feel like a waste of time like a lot of other travesties I've been exposed to.