It's hard to know what to make of this movie - I stumbled upon it from the Others Have Viewed list. The plot centers around a mysterious 17 year old boy called Tom who stumbles from the forest into a remote, self sufficient Christian Mennonite style community somewhere in Europe. Tom is gaunt, bedraggled and has no recollection of where he is from except that both parents are dead or how he got into the forest so the assumption is he has suffered some kind of brain damage. He also bears serious scars to his wrists and abdomen in the pattern representative of the stigmata which becomes the source of speculation in the community.
A family in the community agree to take him in and he is nursed back to health and seems to quickly embrace the puritanical, fundamentalist Catholic lifestyle with communal eating and working and bathing fully clothed. At first everyone is accepting and kind to Tom and then he begins to attract community attention due to his perceived gift of healing. It begins with a strange baptism mimicking ritual engaged in by the teenagers and children of the community where a girl called Shossama who is a similar age and someone who Tom seems to be attracted to (and the feeling is mutual but suppressed), seems to have drowned and Tom brings her back to life to the amazement of the children. His gift extends to the miraculous healing of the mother of the family he is living with and this catapults Tom to center stage in the religious life of the community complete with him laying hands on people to bless them. The movie culminates in the mother of a boy lost in the woods for days asking Tom to use his powers to find the boy and Tom spends a whole day roaming the forest to eventually find the boy .... or seemingly.
This is where Good Favour gets weird - the shots of Tom carrying the boy in his arms into the village alternate between the live young boy and a dead baby deer. The deer theme began earlier when an adult doe appears by Tom's bedside, watches him and leaves only for Tom to follow the deer ... naked - the interpretation of what scenes like this mean is entirely in the eyes of the viewer. It is hard to know where the director Rebecca Daly is going with all this. Whilst the recreation of community life appears respectful, one wonders if there is not an element of morbid fascination about the faith and practices of religious extremists and portraying the power this disoriented teenager ends up having is an indirect way of pointing the finger at the way some religious groupings can follow someone with cult like adulation.
The move also shows its committee like production and direction team from Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. It is never clear where the sect are located except when the police arrive about the missing boy, they speak German. Many of the characters apart from Tom are played by obviously Scandinavian actors and yet all speak English in the village. The movie was shot in rural Belgium. The cinematography is superb, the movie, whilst a little slow at times, is suspenseful and tight. It is interesting that the lead role went to a relatively unknown Belgian actor Vincent Romeo but you can see why he was cast, he has a quietly intense and expressive face that is tailor made for the unusual role and he is most believable.
A family in the community agree to take him in and he is nursed back to health and seems to quickly embrace the puritanical, fundamentalist Catholic lifestyle with communal eating and working and bathing fully clothed. At first everyone is accepting and kind to Tom and then he begins to attract community attention due to his perceived gift of healing. It begins with a strange baptism mimicking ritual engaged in by the teenagers and children of the community where a girl called Shossama who is a similar age and someone who Tom seems to be attracted to (and the feeling is mutual but suppressed), seems to have drowned and Tom brings her back to life to the amazement of the children. His gift extends to the miraculous healing of the mother of the family he is living with and this catapults Tom to center stage in the religious life of the community complete with him laying hands on people to bless them. The movie culminates in the mother of a boy lost in the woods for days asking Tom to use his powers to find the boy and Tom spends a whole day roaming the forest to eventually find the boy .... or seemingly.
This is where Good Favour gets weird - the shots of Tom carrying the boy in his arms into the village alternate between the live young boy and a dead baby deer. The deer theme began earlier when an adult doe appears by Tom's bedside, watches him and leaves only for Tom to follow the deer ... naked - the interpretation of what scenes like this mean is entirely in the eyes of the viewer. It is hard to know where the director Rebecca Daly is going with all this. Whilst the recreation of community life appears respectful, one wonders if there is not an element of morbid fascination about the faith and practices of religious extremists and portraying the power this disoriented teenager ends up having is an indirect way of pointing the finger at the way some religious groupings can follow someone with cult like adulation.
The move also shows its committee like production and direction team from Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. It is never clear where the sect are located except when the police arrive about the missing boy, they speak German. Many of the characters apart from Tom are played by obviously Scandinavian actors and yet all speak English in the village. The movie was shot in rural Belgium. The cinematography is superb, the movie, whilst a little slow at times, is suspenseful and tight. It is interesting that the lead role went to a relatively unknown Belgian actor Vincent Romeo but you can see why he was cast, he has a quietly intense and expressive face that is tailor made for the unusual role and he is most believable.