It could have been disconcerting for a movie star. More likely, it was something of a relief. Either way, Andy Garcia spent the first few days on location for The Unsaid in the Canadian prairie burg of Regina, Saskatchewan, more or less invisible. As in, not being recognised by anyone. This wasn’t entirely surprising, however: Garcia’s famous brooding features - used to such effect in films like The Godfather: Part II (for which he was Oscar nominated) and When a Man Loves a Woman - were hidden behind the thick, salt-and-pepper beard of a mid-Western college professor. Slipping round Regina in corduroy coat and khaki trousers, Garcia was as unremarkable as he would have been in Lawrence, Kansas, which is where The Unsaid is actually set.
Not far into the movie, however, Garcia goes clean-shaven, a scene which worked on the first take - fortunately, since it had taken him 10 weeks to grow the beard. In the context of the story, the change in appearance is pretty important: it signifies the moment at which Garcia’s character, Dr Michael Hunter, realises he has to take control of things.
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Troubled teen meets guilt-ridden psychologist in The Unsaid, an
edgy thriller which gets its international premiere in Deauville
this month. Eleanor Singer reports.
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Taking control is one of the themes of The Unsaid, as Hunter comes out of his academic ‘retirement’ (he used to be a practising psychologist) to treat a psychotic teenager called Tommy (Vincent Kartheiser). Tommy is all control, at any rate on the surface. But, in reality, his life has been warped, possibly for ever, by an abusive parent. The case is an especially difficult one for Hunter, because what he had retreated from into academic life was a trauma of his own, caused by the suicide of his teenage son (a scene frighteningly depicted in the movie, as Hunter breaks into his garage to find his son’s body).
“It’s about a father seeking redemption for the loss of one son through another boy,” suggests Garcia of the character he plays. “Here’s a man who is feeling a huge tragedy in his life and is guilt-ridden because of that. The journey for him is to seek some sort of redemption for what he believes he was responsible for - in this case, the suicide of his son. I found that to be very powerful and it spoke to me when I read the script.”
“The thing that will appeal to people in this movie,” adds Linda Cardellini, a familiar face to US TV viewers as Lindsay Weir in Freaks and Geeks, who plays Hunter’s daughter, “is that it’s a different point of view of what drives somebody to do things that seem evil.”
The Unsaid is, reckons executive producer Al Munteanu, “an intelligent thriller that unveils something we don’t really want to see”. In the tradition of Primal Fear and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, it is a kind of modern monster movie, the monster in this case being one of the many that lurk inside the human mind. “In the film, what we have essentially is a very realistic monster that runs through the piece,” says director Tom McLoughlin. “The things that scare us in life are those mysteries we haven’t quite figured out, whether they lie within the human brain or in the dark.”
The Unsaid should be familiar ground for McLoughlin. Among the two dozen movies he has directed since his 1983 debut, One Dark Night (which he co-wrote and which starred Meg Tilly), are Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Freddy’s Nightmares and Stephen King’s Sometimes They Come Back.
But McLoughlin is adamant that it is not the special effects which make the supernatural truly terrifying: it is echoes from the real world. “I still hold the position of being the only director who has directed Jason, Freddy and done a Stephen King movie,” he says. “My monsters in television became very real stories about AIDS, global warming, battered women, mental illness - a lot of things that are the real villains we have to deal with in society.”
And this is what drew him to The Unsaid. “It’s a very realistic story about a psychologist who had a tragedy in his life,” he explains. “It’s about the ghosts that come into this particular situation where he’s trying to help a boy not to go down the dark path himself.”
Hunter is persuaded to take on the case by Barbara Lonigan (played by Teri Polo, Ben Stiller’s other half in Meet the Parents), a former student who thinks he may be the only one who can help Tommy. Tommy reminds Hunter of Kyle, his dead son, and part of the reason he agrees to take on the case is because he thinks it will help him deal with his own guilt. But he is unprepared for what he will find, especially when he discovers that his daughter, Shelly (Cardellini), has been seeing Tommy behind his back in a typical gesture of teenage defiance that will have dire consequences. Gradually, a series of horrific acts accumulate, all of which seem to point back to Tommy. And so, for Hunter, doing his job as a psychologist, saving his daughter’s life and confronting the ghosts of his own past all come together in the film’s climax.
