rampantpolanski

This is one seriously messed up movie: If you like films like 'Repulsion', 'La Pianiste' or even 'Black Swan' (which I didn't think all that much of) or just beautiful unhinged women going further off the rails generally, I recommend you give it a look.

It's a European production from Danish director Morgenthaler, and feels miles away from anything made by Hollywood, yet it stars the bewilderingly youthful-looking Kim Basinger, who here is a revelation at her very best, with flawless support from Jordan Prentice and the always reliable Peter Stormare.

'I Am Here' is a dark, still, tense and creepy place to go, but I'm glad I did.

Unlike Christopher Nolan's magnificent 'Memento', and even '50 First Dates' - both of which this film is clearly heavily indebted to - this particular take on the dramatic possibilities of head trauma and memory loss never convinces, never makes sense, and ultimately fails because it refuses to adhere to the rules the premise itself demands.

Kidman's character has character progressions that are way beyond the bounds of believability right from the start, and by the time we're halfway in, she might as well have nothing wrong with her at all, for all she is retaining from earlier in the film and the way she is behaving.

It's a nicely made film but basically one you've seen a hundred times before, in a hundred other 'woman in peril' potboilers, just with the memory gimmick thrown in for colour, and it's the gimmick itself that sinks it in the end.

I couldn't for the life of me see how anyone was going to turn a book about wrestling into a brooding thriller, and the trailer for it frankly looked about as gay as a c*ck in a frock and his socks on a rock in Bangkok.

But 'Foxcatcher' turns out to be a relentlessly dark, hypnotically tense, creepy film that's almost anti-Hollywood in all its silence and subtlety, with so many of the most powerful moments being communicated through pauses, glances, flickers of recognition and realization, with no dumbing down or over-explaining to the cattle-stalls. Amazing they got such big names in to make it, even if you can't recognize the most famous one in it at all.

Really, it's only a film 'about' wrestling in so far as Million Dollar Baby is a film 'about' boxing. And nowhere near as depressing, either, so that helps.