In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
Acclaimed Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s eighth feature is a mild-mannered psychological thriller that’s all the more creepy for its gentle pace and the nostalgic way it’s shot, with scratchy, rich colours and long, lingering dolly shots.
Based on a novel by William Trevor, Felicia’s Journey tells the story of simple rural Irish girl Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), who’s seduced and knocked-up by caddish local boy Johnny (rumoured to have joined the English Army). Her father brands her a whore for getting impregnated by ‘the enemy’, so when Johnny takes off to Birmingham for a job in a ‘lawnmower factory’, Felicia follows him, convinced that as soon as he finds out she’s pregnant they’ll live happily ever after.
Lost and alone in Birmingham with little chance of finding her errant baby-daddy, Felicia finds help from an unlikely corner – fastidious factory canteen manager Joseph Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), whose seeming good intentions belie a much darker truth. Hilditch, it’s gradually revealed, has a bit of a habit of ‘helping out’ vulnerable young women – it’s a brand of help that invariably ends up with them buried in his back garden.
Hilditch is a shiveringly absurd and eccentric creation, and actor Hoskins plays the part with note-perfection, managing to simultaneously communicate Hilditch’s mask of mild-manners and the menacing threat that lurks beneath. One of the great joys of Felicia’s Journey is the way that the madness in Hilditch is slowly revealed: from his childhood stardom beside his TV chef mother and his obsessive re-watching of their videos, to the room full of blenders, the epic feasts that he cooks for himself each night, the fact that he videotapes passengers in his car and files the tapes away… Egoyan lets the pieces of the plot drop into place slowly and satisfyingly.
A less complex and layered film than Egoyan’s other work, Felicia’s Journey nevertheless effectively transports to the screen the pace and mood of its literary source, and measuredly develops a Hitchcockian tale that’s as gently creepy as antagonist Joseph Hilditch.
- Nick Jarvis
“A rare example of a literary film that preserves the best of its source while creatively filling up on it.” Michael Wilmington - Chicago Tribune
Felicia's Journey | Bob Hoskins | Atom Egoyan | Elaine Cassidy | Movie Trailer | Review
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.