"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...
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...