Starring: Leila George, Greta Scacchi, Sam Corlett
Runtime: 102 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2024
Reviewer: Ann Rennie
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A desperate woman kidnaps and enforces rehab on her violent brother in a last-ditch effort to save their lives.
This film is not easy viewing, but it needs to be seen. It was inspired by true events.
We have a tsunami of mental illness occasioned or exacerbated by drug addiction and this film interrogates how the impact of addiction can wreak havoc in the family unit. It is harrowing as we see the lengths to which a sibling will go to save her brother, to get him ‘clean’ for another attempt at rehab.
Jade (George) is Max’s sister and her life has effectively been put on hold as she does whatever she can to help him get off drugs. She is 30 and admits tearfully that she has done nothing with her life as her friends travel, have careers and babies and settle into a level of contentment that escapes her. She decides to make use of her deceased grandmother’s empty home to imprison Max for a week, putting bars on windows, providing food and water through these, doing what she feels is necessary to get him to go ‘cold turkey’. Her desperate actions are born out of love and last resort. She rigs up a baby monitor camera so she can keep an eye on him.
Max, played by Sam Corlett with such skill that the art of acting simply disappeared, could be anyone’s child gone deeply astray. This is a nightmare in suburbia as the opening scene is full of screaming and abuse as Max bashes on the door at his family home. His mother (Scacchi) simply turns up the TV to block out the noise. In many ways she is a loving but ineffectual mother who still refers to her son as ‘my boy’ seeing him as the sweet toddler he was, not the angry, dirty, manipulative lost soul he has become. The photo of him as a blond-haired baby with a Mickey Mouse dummy in his mouth is heart melting. We observe a tender moment when she washes the grime off her adult son’s hands as he sleeps. Mother and daughter make a birthday cake for him and in his mental fogginess he cannot remember how old he is. Viewers will elicit different feelings, but certainly this film does not shy away from the impact of a family under siege. The scene post-birthday cake is sad and scary.
Max has earlier suffered from panic attacks and Jade is the one who can calm him down as she instructs him to ‘breathe, breathe’. She herself manages to find occasional calm and sanctuary at a waterhole where the daily drama is briefly pushed aside, although she hurts herself by deliberately grazing her hand hard on the rocks. This hurt is mirrored by the self-inflicted stab wounds on Max’s legs which we later see in a close-up. What we see is that Max needed professional help much earlier and, on one occasion, is turned away from hospital as there is a seven hour wait for someone to see him.
The setting is a brick veneer home with its ’70s décor. Familiar to many viewers will be the door jamb where family heights are measured in pencil. This rather minor but evocative detail, harking back to a happier childhood for both children, points to the care with which this film has been made. Scenes of a family car trip singing along to Abba will resonate with many.
Jade tells Max she is doing this because she is terrified she is going to lose him. She tells him, in that blunt vernacular, that he has mucked up her life. He replies that she simply has no idea of what he is going through. No idea. And perhaps that is a point we need to be mindful of when we see people like this. We have no idea of back story or difficulties faced or domestic dysfunction.
While drug affected Max has bashed up and put an innocent man into a coma. He has no memory of doing this and says it isn’t who he is. The lesson here is that drugs can erase a moral code and anything goes to score the next fix.
Scacchi is an actress of great range. (I remember seeing her as Tuppence Beresford with Anthony Andrews as Tommy in a 2006 Agatha Christie episode and, of course, many will remember her as the mother Christina in Looking for Alibrandi, 2000). Here she is not asked to do so much but evoke an existential tiredness at the domestic terrorism which now makes her life heartbreaking. She says to Jade, ‘There’s only so much you can do for another person’ as Jade continues to battle for her brother’s life. Scacchi and George are mother and daughter. Look at their eyes. As with Corlett, their acting doesn’t show through such is the naturalness of their interactions.
This is a powerful film. It tells it how it is for those families with a loved one caught in the clutches of drugs and suffering mental health issues. There are moments of laughter and tenderness, as well as those of explosive anger and sadness, especially when Max says resignedly, ‘I can’t beat it’. Corlett was absolutely compelling. Not an easy film, but one that absolutely needed to be made.
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