Train in Vain

Backtrack (2016) is another ghost story for Spooktober (hope we don’t run out!). It’s kind of a small movie, starring Adrian “Broody” Brody.

Brody is a psychiatrist, deeply traumatized by the death of a young daughter. He’s better off than his wife, Jenni Baird, who can barely get out of bed. He drags himself to his mentor Sam Neill, who is referring patients to him - he seems to have moved to this city from somewhere else - it’s all vaguely in Australia, although pretty much no one has an accent. He sees a few patients, looking pained and sad while they tell him their problems. Actually, since it’s Adrian Brody, he can’t help but look pained and sad. One woman tells him she feels like she’s invisible, and wants to kill herself but she can’t.

A girl appears in his waiting room, who doesn’t seem to be able to talk. He tries to communicate, find out her problems, but she vanishes again. On his way home on the subway, he sits next to the woman who feels invisible, and doesn’t recognize her until she speaks up. She tells him she knows why she can’t kill herself - she’s already dead. Then she turns into a demon and attacked him. And then he wakes up on the train.

In fact this happens a few times in the movie: things spiral out of control and then Brody wakes up. Not as much as in Twixt, but still a motif.

So, to SPOILER the first twist, it turns out that all of Brody’s patients are ghosts, and so is Neill, his mentor. They all died in a train wreck, in Brody’s old home town. So he goes back to find out what he is repressing. He leaves his wife behind, because she isn’t really in this movie.

Back in his home town, he sees his father, a retired policeman. He also meets up with an old school friend who tells him not to investigate and to leave him out of it. He also checks in with the local policewoman, Robin McLeavy. It turns out she was the mother of the ghost girl in the waiting room. Brody finally recovers the memory of biking out to the train tracks to watch lovers park and make out. The train hit their bikes on the tracks and derailed, killing many. He confesses to McLeavy, who takes it pretty well, considering. His friend, on the other hand, hangs himself.

But this isn’t the end - there’s one more twist and a tense standoff on the train tracks. But I’ll leave that for people who haven’t watched yet.

Not sure I have much to say about this - it was a good ghost movie with a few flaws, like the weird almost-not-Australia setting. A lot depends on how you feel about watching Adrian Brody looking hurt, sad, worried, concerned and broody for a whole movie.