Like Minds

A schoolboy is suspected of murder in this Australian-British thriller set at a boarding school in the UK. Toni Collette is Sally Rowe, a police psychologist who spends much of the film interviewing posh, sulky Alex (Eddie Redmayne) in a wavering English accent. Alex denies shooting his equally posh, sulky classmate Nigel (Tom Sturridge), and as he relates his version of events, flashbacks show how keen taxidermist Nigel began to draw Alex into his dark world.

And so Rowe must attempt to wrestle the truth from the supposedly brilliant young mind. But debut writer-director Gregory J Read makes it hard to care, offering up superficial, monotonal characters (you never escape the feeling that you’re watching pretty boys playing psychopaths). Interesting plot developments – such as Alex’s fatal crush on a schoolgirl – are all too brief, buried under heavy-handed scoring and semi-intelligible waffle about secret societies, pacts and so on. The ending is unclear: the old explanatory-flashback trick might have helped in this case. Toni Collette must have owed the director quite a favour.