♱ maka ♱

BY RJURIK DAVIDSON

What could have driven this innocent-looking youth to murder, or is he, as he claims, innocent? This is the question that forensic psychologist Sally Rowe (toni Collette) must answer. The interview process, together with Rowe’s own investigation, forms the first storyline of Like Minds.  The second storyline, which is the heart of the narrative, is intercut with the first.  It is Alex's retelling of the macabre and disturbing events that led to the murder of Nigel (Tom Sturridge).

In this story, Nigel arrives at a prestigious boarding school and becomes Alex's new roommate. Nigel is brooding and quiet.  He spends his time alone, dissecting animals and writing in voluminous notebooks.  He is, to the other boys, a freak. But he’s a freak who slowly draws Alex into his fantasy world, a world dominated by the history of the Knights Templar, the murder of the heretical Christians known as the Cathars, and the Templar myth of Maraclea.  According to this myth, Maraclea was the true love of one of the Knights Templar.  Before they could be married, she died tragically.  Devastated, he dug up her dead body and made love to it.  Nine months later, the knight was summoned to the grave, and on opening the coffin found that the body’s head had been moved beneath its hips and its thigh bones crossed, (the origin of the sign of the skull and crossbones, Nigel tells us).  This myth becomes central to Nigel’s gradual entrapment of Alex, and a ghoulish replay of the myth brings the story to a climax.

But it is more than a question of entrapment, for it seems that Alex himself has awakened these dark fantasies in Nigel: they have entered into a Gestalt relationship, in which ‘the whole is more important than the sum of its parts’.  Gestalt psychology is the true and central subject

of Like Minds.  Alex cannot help being dragged into Nigel’s fantasy world.  He finds himself agreeing to secret rendezvous, reading Nigel’s histories of the Templars and the Cathars, and taking on his friend’s obsessions.  It is as if Nigel is in his mind and can read his thoughts.  As

writer-director Gregory Read explains: 

There is a big misconception about psychopaths. The majority of psychopaths are not killers at all.  They are out there functioning in society, maybe in a very dysfunctional way but still, they are not necessarily dangerous.  I thought, what happens if we put two potentially ‘normal’ psychopaths together in a close environment? Could they trigger something in each other?’  

Filmed alternately in Yorkshire (the boarding school scenes), Adelaide (the police interview scenes), and New South Wales (the train scenes), the film is a macabre psychological thriller whose interest in Gestalt psychology is mirrored in its very structure, in which both storylines

resonate with each other.  At times the complexity of Like Minds strains and even ruptures its own bounds.  There are moments when the sheer amount of conceptual information threatens to overwhelm the viewer.  What, we ask, is the relationship of all this – the Templars, the myth of Maraclea, Gestalt psychology, the fact that almost all the adult males belong to a club apparently descended from the templars – to the story of the two boys?  But if this is a weakness it is also a redeeming feature: better a film be too complicated than thin and empty.  Read’s aim was to:

... think of it more in terms of a psychological puzzle, one which the audience can piece together.  With this in mind it was imperative that all the pieces were carefully defined, allowing the audience to read the clues through the story, and draw their own conclusion in retrospect.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t quite hold together.  The adult male club, for example, sits in the background threatening but never actually coming into play.  Nor is it exactly clear, by the film’s end, of what happened, and more importantly, what the motivations of the characters were.  The viewer is left to backtrack through the scenes to try to reassess.  The script also sometimes falls into the awkward error of transmitting chunks of information through dialogue.  Some of these moments form the film’s low points, as characters become mere mouthpieces for information or discourses about history.  The film is thus reminiscent of adaptations of novels for the screen, which so often fall into the same difficulties.

The history of Knights Templar is, in the wake of The Da Vinci Code, not exactly original material (though the myth of Maraclea and the history of the Cathars chart more original territory).  Neither is the boarding-school psychological thriller exactly unfamiliar.  Notions of half-forgotten histories, of secret clubs and the power of mythology, are common in the literature of the macabre, and at moments the film suffers from a disconcerting sense of déja vu.  What originality it shows lies in its combination of these elements.

Like Minds is distinguished by strong direction with great attention to the mise-en-scène.  The film makes great use of the brooding Yorkshire landscape with its muted light and bleak weather.  Director of Photography Nigel Bluck says: 

The Yorkshire scenery was great.  The starkness of the leafless trees and the muted colours, the soft low English light, the classical stone architecture and the atmosphere of the snow were perfect for the mood we were trying to create in the film.

Adding to this is a nicely underplayed and moody score by Carlo Giacco, which works well with the direction.  Giacco composed the music so that there were:

... no cues where the music heralds what’s going to happen.  It follows rather than flags what is occurring dramatically.  The element of surprise works to great effect in the film throughout and it was important not to pre-empt that musically.

Without doubt there are some strong performances, most notably those of Eddie Redmayne and Toni Collette.  Redmayne is a young actor to watch.  Though this is only his first feature film, he captures the character of Alex with subtle verisimilitude. Director Read claims that ‘I wanted to find someone who had the eyes.  The casting was all about the eyes.’  This, however, proves to be truer of Tom Sturridge’s portrayal of Nigel.  Rather, Eddie Redmayne’s facial expressions as a whole carry his performance.  Indeed, this is no easy task considering the occasionally clunky dialogue, yet it is one he carries off with aplomb.  Collette, meanwhile creates a consummately professional performance from rather thin material, while Richard Roxburgh is less convincing as police officer Martin McKenzie, though the part offers probably the least potential for dramatic variation.  Here again, the film suffers from over-complexity. Roxburgh and Collette’s characters have apparently once had some kind of romantic relationship, a fact referred to only once or twice.  In this, as in various other elements, Read might have done better to strip out a character or two and simplify the film.  A 110-minute feature can only bear so many ingredients.

Like Minds is not, in the end, a ground-breaking film. Its key concerns – what is psychopathology?  What makes a psychopath? – will be familiar to most viewers.  Its interest in medieval history likewise has the touch of the familiar about it, even if some of the specifics are original. For a part-Australian film it does chart some new territory, delving into the sub-genre of the psychological thriller where recent Australian staples have been comedies or relationship dramas. Never boring, what carries the film is its satisfying pace, strong direction, well-planned mise-en-scène and strong performances.  It’s a film that shows that Gregory Read has talent, which should develop beyond this promising but unremarkable first feature.

Rjurik Davidson is a freelance writer and editor. He has taught at Victoria University, RMIT and La Trobe University. 

For additional reading, please see: [Like Minds Masterpost - Main]