One Eyed Girl (2014)

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Travis was the worst unprofessional mental health doctor ever. Sex with a patient. The he goes off to a cut camp after she kills herself. He sees a mentally ill male getting raped in the wood, so what he goes and confront him, and then confront his rapist in front of the entire cult. Tom goes to recuse Travis the next day, but he's the most HollyWood breakdown van ever made.Then he goes out of his way to help the rapist cult leader. Then this smart guy goes to rescue a very mentally ill Grace(who's about to kill people on a train with children.

I saw this movie last year at the ECU film festival in Paris and still to this day, I think about it often. I am not familiar with Australian movies but I am so grateful the organizers of the festival have selected this movie. The concept of healing the soul was really disturbing to me and very powerful. It made me change the way I view negative past experience. The idea I had of Australia was beaches, surf and ice cream but the decor is more like a Scandinavian thriller movie. The music has great beauty and makes the movie really haunting. This is a deep analysis of a man's life into the darkest places in his head. The cast was really well chosen and their performances shows so much courage and intelligence. This is the first movie for this director and I am impatient to see more of his work.

I have to agree with one of the other reviewers that there isn't much, if anything, to recommend this by-the-books cult drama.We have a chemically-dependent, terminally depressed young shrink (played convincingly enough by Mark Leonard Winter) whose young patient's suicide drives him over the edge, leading him into a cult-like EST-ish back-to-nature group led by Father Jay (Steve le Marquand).Father Jay's group is all about getting "clear" (sound familiar?) and uses various punishing physical and mental techniques to supposedly "heal the soul".So... is there anything you've heard so far that leads you to believe this is unlike any other cult you've heard about before?Nope, didn't think so. And there isn't. I guess this might be shocking material for those who've never heard of brainwashing or even Charlie Manson, but it's snooze-inducing for those of us who have.It's a pity because this isn't a poorly made film. The acting is decent. It just revolves around a non-story that's ordinary and non-compelling, to be kind. It's only 103 minutes, but it feels like a century. What a complete waste of everyone's time, including ours.

It's an unwelcome responsibility to be the only one to write about this bubble from the swamp of fringe Australian production in which the hopes of a cross section of the country's film making talent are obviously emotionally invested. It has one great idea, the broken character absorbed into a cult gone bush is himself a therapist, which gives him some understanding of what is happening.However if we are going to tackle this film on the level of high seriousness, which it clearly would like, note absence of religion which is the back bone of pretty well all such operations and the objection that sudden sodomy is not the central evil that makes them destructive.The grainy images assembled in jagged discontinuity take a while to lose conviction and there are moments which engage - Winter's self dismissal, Le Marquand's Iraq monologue, the swinging at the punching bag routine. However on a single viewing there is no feeling that there is some great truth buried by the production's excessive length.