Confiança Fatal

This is an OK way to spend a little time, but the conclusion really didn't work.

The lead, Kate, is played by Amy Jo Johnson who is best known (to me at least) for her role as Julie on Felicity. Here she plays a young widower with a son that decides to "move back home" after her husband dies in front of a train.

What starts as a drama gradually becomes a murder mystery. The story is very formulaic and predictable but the actors mostly do a decent job. It never really becomes scary because the outcome is so easy to predict, but that would have been OK with me were it not for the conclusion shown after the story is done.

The director, Philippe Gagnon, has some potential but still has a long way to go. The flashbacks used don't add to the story and the romance is not done with any flair. Despite all it's flaws I still thought this was an OK way to spend a sleepless night - just don't go in expecting much.

I get the play on words with the title. "Fatal Trust" refers to the fact (as Kate points out in the movie) that we routinely and without a second thought place our lives in the hands of complete strangers who we allow to do all sorts of invasive things to us just because they're doctors. It's a point that gets made in the closing captions of the movie, which share a couple of incidents in which doctors were guilty of murdering their patients. So the point is clear - doctors are humans, and just because they're doctors doesn't mean that they can't kill. Point taken. And I thought the climactic confrontation between Kate and Dr. Lucas was reasonably exciting. But overall the movie was something of a disappointment.

Kate (Amy Jo Johnson - who I'm not at all familiar with) moves from the big city back to the small town where she grew up after her husband is murdered. She gets a job working as assistant to Dr. Lucas (David Haydn-Jones - also not really familiar with him) and over the course of time (a short period of time) she becomes suspicious because several of his elderly patients (including her own mother before Kate moved back) die suddenly.

So it's a kind of murder mystery, and it's honestly nothing special. The acting and writing are both second-rate, and the revelation of how the doctor actually kills his victims actually made me chuckle a little bit because it seemed so silly. It's thankfully fairly short at a little under an hour and a half (it was made for TV and was probably two hours once commercials were inserted) and I'll give it the credit of saying that the story does move along relatively well. Unfortunately, it's just not that good a movie. (3/10)

Evil is what is up - no pun intended. Of course the movie at hand is not hard to decipher. You will have no trouble at all to see where it is going. So if you are a fan of mysteries in your thrillers ... well this ain't the movie to watch for you. If you have soft spot for movies of the week on the other hand ... well you can guess yourself (you know I love me some puns).

All that being said, it is nice to see Amy Jo Johnson in something again. I had seen her in that canadian cop show - but obviously she has done much more things. Suspend your disbelief and just go with the flow - otherwise you won't have any fun at all with this (no pun intended)

It's funny how everyone's talking about a grieving widow, when right from the word go she was all laughs and smiles and bubbly given the horrible way her husband died in front of her eyes and she missed her own mother's funeral. Oh and she didn't mess around in getting all mushy and doe eyed with her former high school boyfriend. Forget about doctor death, concentrate on Kate!

I'm sure that the movie is based on the English serial killer Dr Harold Shipman