Worth: $14.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Jack Thompson, Aden Young, Sara West, Rachel Griffiths
Intro:
A highly affecting drama based on real events.
This movie is based on real events – sad to say, given that it’s about a court case involving child sexual abuse. The setting is Toowoomba, Queensland, and the year is 2001.
The always convincing Aden Young plays Stephen Roche, a lawyer whose latest case has culminated in the suicide of the plaintiff. (“Another win for the Pope, eh?”, he bitterly remarks.) With great reluctance, Roche agrees to take up the cause of Lyndal (Sara West), a young woman who claims to have been sexually abused as a twelve-year-old at a church school back in 1990.
Roche and barrister Bob Myers (Jack Thompson) set about securing justice for the deeply distressed but determined Lyndal, the defence team employs various convoluted and cunning tactics, and the plot thickens. Lyndal’s prospects aren’t helped by the fact that the alleged perpetrator – who may have had many other victims – has long since committed suicide.
This film is inevitably harrowing, given its tragic subject matter, and especially so in the flashback scenes. Some of the minor performances are a bit wooden, and pitched at the level of a TV movie, but the lead actors are all good enough and Sara West is excellent. Even some of the less intense aspects – to do with legal machinations, strategies and such finer points as the difference between compensatory and exemplary damages – somehow hold our attention, and the core drama is highly affecting. Don’t Tell definitely ‘gets us in’, and overall, it’s not bad at all.
‘Don’t Tell’ impressed me greatly and I’d rate it somewhat higher than your reviewer Mark has done. Maybe I was influenced by the fact that as a retired solicitor, I empathised strongly with the character so ably played by Aden Young, and also by the fact that the circumstances surrounding this court case played no small role in my decision to leave the Anglican church 20 years ago..,