Backtrack

Backtrack

Like the clairvoyant boy in “The Sixth Sense,” the tormented protagonist of Michael Petroni’s “Backtrack” sees dead people. However, he is not as quick to identify them; audiences might be more attuned to the insinuating clues at play. Psychiatrist Peter Bower (Adrien Brody) works in a whispery office that seems located somewhere within Australian precincts of the Twilight Zone, and his patients are all decidedly strange if they aren’t made up of shimmery give-away ectoplasm.

There’s a buttoned-up middle-aged musician who claims to play in a club that Bower knows closed many years ago. He thinks it’s 1987 and that Ronald Reagan is president. Others under Bower’s care show similar temporal delusions. But the strangest is a hooded girl named Elizabeth Valentine (Chloe Bayliss), who appears with the suddenness of an unannounced spirit and seems to harbor some terrible secret.

Bothered, Bower consults with his friend and psychiatric mentor Duncan (the venerable Sam Neill). Even before their first talk takes place, we learn that Bower has been staggering through life under an enormous burden of guilt. Not long ago, his little daughter Evie was killed when he was momentarily distracted by traffic. (The dead daughter motif will remind some viewers of Nicolas Roeg’s far creepier “Don’t Look Now.”) Duncan readily grasps the sign that this tragedy and Bowen’s current perplexities are connected: Elizabeth Valentine’s initials contain Evie’s name.

Soon enough, mounting weirdnesses compel Bower back to his small hometown where all those previous references to 1987 start adding up. Though he has repressed it from consciousness, that was also the year when 47 people died in a horrific train wreck outside town. Looking at newspaper clippings about the accident leads him to realize there was one Elizabeth Valentine on board among recent patients.

It gets worse than this. In ’87 Bower was a teen out with a buddy spying on Lover’s Lane near train tracks when disaster struck; could they have had something do with it? And why doesn’t surly alcoholic dad William (George Shevtosv), police chief assigned crash investigator, lend any help?

There are several further levels beneath those described above every guilty secret seems planted atop another deeper more drastic layer hiding under it like Russian nesting dolls or Freud’s theory(s). Psychiatrists speak of “screen memories,” uncomfortable false recollections disguising actual painful ones buried deeper still inside psyche; Backtrack resembles cake layers made from same batter only different flavor frosting used between layers each time!

Nonetheless, Petroni is a gifted storyteller with a keen sense for visuals. Even before the story takes us back to Bower’s hometown and its fateful train tracks, trains become an omnipresent visual motif in much the same way as they do in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.” The idea of characters being connected in complicated and potentially catastrophic ways is suggested by their presence throughout the movie. The director handles action deftly usually creating carefully orchestrated atmospherics that are only occasionally enlivened by horror-movie shock cuts.

Petroni draws fine performances from his estimable cast, especially Adrien Brody, who is supported by excellent work from cinematographer Stefan Duscio and composer Dale Cornelius. Brody easily proves that his very credible Aussie accent makes him ideal for supernatural-horror roles requiring elongated visages and deep-set eyes capable of looking into dimensions too scary for other mortals.

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