 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Backtrack • Year: 2015 • Country: Australia, UK, United Arab Emirates • Director: Michael Petroni • Main cast: Adrien Brody, Sam Neill, Robin McLeavy • Runtime: 90 minutes • Production company: Head Gear Films, Metrol Technology, Screen Australia • TRAILER |
If we had to believe what movies say, dead people have a strong tendency to have plenty of unfinished business, and they always make it to come back to the kingdom of the living to annoy us until somebody help them out to clear up their conscience, so they can move on and stay with the dead. This statement could be a wide summarize of most spiritual or ghost movies. It doesn’t really matter if the genre is horror, drama, comedy… But spirits have that thing, they like to stay around asking “what about my stuff?”.
This start point of a tormented spirit is so used in modern movies that it is easy to get surrounded by lots and lots of copycats. And I am afraid that is what Backtrack is. It starts with a psychologist who recently lost his little daughter and now doesn’t know what is a memory, what is reality, or who are his friends and who are his clients. So a handful of circumstances make him go back to his childhood town and try to sort things out with his father. Then the box of hidden secrets opens and more cliches flow from it.
Backtrack is writen and directed by Michael Petroni, who is better known by is writting credits than his directional works. His are the texts from other movies that had a decent startpoint but ended up as boring and intranscendental films, like The Rite (2011) or the awful version of an excelent Anne Rice novel that was Queen of the Damned (2002). And this time with Backtrack the story repeats itself. The idea might be interesting, and with actors like Adrien Brody, Sam Neill or Robin McLeavy (who delighted us with the underrated The Loved Ones (2009)) we could had expected a better result. But Petroni focuses too much in trying to create a cold and creepy staging, which neither succeeded, and forgets about the narrative. And when originality lacks, you better bring something else or the final product won’t be able to be more than lame.
And that is what we got, another boring and empty vengeful spirits movie with a couple of decent ideas but a very bad global resolution. Only to be recommended to hardcore ghosts flicks fans. For the rest of us Backtrack is utterly forgettable.
RATE: 4/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2784936
