The Fall Before Paradise

Supernatural thriller

Reissued by Flashback Entertainment

R4 DVD

This well made independent film is an example of what can be done with good acting, good direction and a good plot. There is a slight air of unreality about it that adds to the plot.

The film opens with a small family group. When the mother wants to go out her 6 year old daughter is terrified to be left with the de facto father, a drunken redneck. When the mother leaves he begins molesting the little girl. Her older brother gets a gun and goes to shoot the molester, but he is very young and is not game to pull the trigger. The father murders him and takes off with the girl.

Some time later a psychiatric patient, Nate, is having strange dreams. He is seeing a little girl’s abduction through the eyes of a little boy. This is where the air of unreality creeps in. When Nate goes off his drugs the dreams become stronger. He feels he may be seeing something that has really happened, and the little boy is talking to him in his dreams and asking for his sister to be rescued. Nate has to escape from the institution first. He is helped by Mattie, a girl obsessed with the idea that the phone company is turning people into “drones” by frequencies they send out over phone or internet calls. She wants to blow up the phone company. Unlike Nate she is a self-admitted patient and can leave when she wants to.

She helps Nate to escape and they go to look at the local telephone exchange so Mattie can plan her attack. Here Nate has a revelation – the tool belt that the abductor is wearing in his dreams is the belt worn by telephone repairers. One man comes from the exchange and Nate recognises him as the abductor. The abductor’s truck has the same numberplates he has seen in his dream. With so much of his dreams being substantiated he knows the little kidnapped girl must be out there, so they follow the abductor’s truck. They track him to his home where he has settled with a new “mother” for the little girl. Her fear when her new mother goes out to get some groceries drives Nate and Mattie to rescue her but can two wanted mental patients overcome a vicious child-molesting redneck?

Although the film relies heavily on mental illnesses to provide moments of humour in Nate’s otherwise institutionalised existence, it is essential to the film. We can understand the effects such strange dreams must have on a sensitive and drugged-up young man, his mental problems and his desire to do something. The institution cannot help him, seeing his dreams as another part of his instability. Nate has to control his dreams, face the world without the support of drugs, control Mattie’s desire for demolition, and all the time try to work out where the little girl is or even if she really exists. The film evokes tremendous sympathy for Nate and even for Mattie, who is well-meaning in spite of her own mental imbalance. The mental health issues are generally fairly treated, striking that fine balance between too much ridicule of the ill and enough to make Nate’s dreams seem credible (at least, in his own mind).

Steve Gillilan has given us a fine film and Flashback’s budget rerelease gives us a chance to see just how good it really is.

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