Worth: $11.00
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Cast:
Rachael Blake, Vince Colosimo, Susie Porter
Intro:
The Second does have its pleasures...
Sexy mystery thrillers (if that is a genre) are a hard thing to pull off. This Australian feature from first-time helmer Mairi Cameron (from a script by Stephen Lance) tries hard to keep the well-known elements fresh. In the end, it is the experienced and attractive cast that more or less brings the ship home.
It mostly takes pace in and around a giant isolated mansion somewhere in the semi-outback. A novelist (Rachael Blake) is having difficulty following up her first bestseller. She goes to this house as a sort of writer’s retreat to pen the sequel – the ‘second’ which the title refers to.
Perhaps unwisely she takes along her publisher (the redoubtable Vince Colosimo) with whom she appears to be having a fling. He soon makes himself at home by the pool while she bashes away at the keyboard. Their little tryst is quickly disturbed, however, by the arrival of a brash and brazen childhood friend of the writer (the ageless Susie Porter).
The three protagonists – it is an oddity of the approach that we never learn their actual names – circle around each other as various plot twists and double-crosses pile up. The problem is that the more you pile them up, the more teetering the tower becomes, and our focus is drawn from any actual identification with the characters to the sheer anticipation of it all crashing down. Sure enough, a genre cascade of near-absurdities does eventually occur and in a way that is likely to leave the viewer baffled.
This is all deliberate on behalf of the filmmakers, of course, but whether the audience will go along with it depends a lot on their appetite for this sort of plotting and scripting. The film also wants to get intertextual by lobbing in a load of elements from films that play on the idea of the threatening local psycho terrorising the city slickers.
The Second does have its pleasures – and it is being fast-tracked to streaming platform Stan, who helped produce – so maybe it will fare well on the content-hungry small screen.
