Main cast: Guy Pearce (Dr Sam Franks), Helena Bonham Carter (Ruby), Frank Gallacher (Maurie Lewis), Lindley Joyner (Young Sam Franks), Brooke Harmon (Silvy Lewis), Peter Curtin (Dr David Franks), and Margot Knight (Dorothy Lewis)
Director: Michael Petroni

However they managed to prevent Guy Pearce’s very wet boxers from becoming even a little translucent in the close-up body shot towards the end of the movie, this method should be banned for the sake of a happier world. Also, Mr Pearce is too thin. I’m not the kind who enjoys counting the ribcage on a man, so someone please feed this guy a burger for me, thanks.

The title of this movie is taken from TS Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, a favorite of both Ruby and Silvy Lewis, two women that make deep impressions on Dr Sam Franks’s life. Sam is a psychoanalyst who however is probably more troubled than many of his clients. When he returns to his childhood hometown of Genoa, Australia to attend to his late father’s burial, he saves a mysterious woman, Ruby, from drowning. Ruby has no memory of her past. As Sam falls in love with her, he remembers the events that shaped his troubled psyche today: he fell in love with Silvy Lewis when they were teenagers, only to had her drown in an accident (he let go of her hand and Silvy had little control over her legs due to a congenital condition). I’m sure you can figure out the connection between Silvy and Ruby.

Not that this connection is spelled out clearly in the ambiguous ending that is open to several interpretations of this connection. To get there, however, I have to suffer through horrendously slow pace and heavy-handed symbolism and allegories, this movie is like a Hallmark card that will result if Hallmark decided to develop a greeting card line for believers in the paranormal. The best parts of this movie revolve around the doomed relationship between Silvy and Sam – the child actors are excellent here – while Mr Pearce and Helena Bonham Carter are adequate for an onscreen couple that generate so little chemistry.

But by being slower than a sedated three-legged tortoise and as subtle as a jackhammer blow to the head, this movie ultimately comes off as some misguided The Twilight Zone episode that takes itself too seriously while boring me to tears. I do wake up to human voices here, but that’s just my snoring at the halfway mark of the movie.