Josh McConville’s knife-edge performance brings psychological realism to an occasionally contrived war drama
Josh McConville delivers a tense, twitchy, vein-popping performance choc-full of rage and confusion as a PTSD-afflicted soldier in Escape and Evasion, writer/director Storm Ashwood’s highly ambitious and technically accomplished war film. Haunted by memories of a botched mission in Myanmar, from which he returned to Australia as the sole survivor, we meet Seth (McConville) as he is bleary-eyed, trembling and inconsolable, holding a gun to his head. Ashwood treats what happened in the jungle as a mystery, to be returned to piecemeal and teased out through flashbacks.
In this sense Escape and Evasion (which had its world premiere on the weekend as the closing-night feature of the Gold Coast film festival) is conceptually similar to 1983’s Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, the terrific feature-length conclusion to the television series M*A*S*H. In it, director Alan Alda elegantly explored the idea of a repressed wartime memory destroying the soul of a survivor, returning to a traumatic scene on a bus to gradually layer it with detail.
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