Have a product you would
like reviewed on this site? Mail to:
The Reviews Page
552 Prince Charles
Dorval, QC H9P 1Z3

Foreign Film - Australia - Noise

CLICK PIC TO BUY AT AMAZON
CLICK PIC FOR NOISE AMAZON PAGE

Noise
Brendan Cowell, Maia Thomas, Katie Wall
Directed by Matthew Saville
Australia 2007
Film Movement 2008
109 minutes
www.filmmovement.com

Noise is one very weird mystery / thriller. Movies from Australia are inherently strange but this one takes the cake and the platter. You really have to go along with this DVD and trust it as Noise is a bit hermetic at first but it is worth the ride.

Noise begins with a girl getting on the subway. Before it reaches the next station she sees  everyone in the train has been killed. The police start investigating but have little to go on. Another body is found near the tracks. Constable Graham McGrahan, suspected of being a slacker by his superiors, is assigned to a caravan being used as an information center by the police. McGraham is to take down whatever the locals can tell him about the crimes.

What makes this movie particularly strange is the main character has tinnitus and this strongly influences the auditory experience for the viewer. Director Matthew Saville is not interested in making just another mystery movie: while his colleagues and superiors are aggressively, very aggressively sometimes, trying to solve the killings the focus is on McGrahan is twiddling his thumbs in the caravan.

There he meets some of the locals, some of whom are very strange. Meanwhile, the one witness to the murders is afraid the killer will go after her because he took the framed graduation picture she was carrying.

Noise slowly builds to a very different climax to which you can give a couple of different interpretations.

Special features include extended and deleted scene and a making of documentary. This is one movie I would have liked to have a director's commentary track for.

Each Film Movement DVD includes a short film. Here, it is Motorcycle, a short from Thailand by Aditya Assarat. A man in a remote village learns of his son's death and prepares for the funeral. I honestly have no idea what Motorcycle is supposed to be saying.