All Around the Town (2002) (TV)

Director:

Paolo Barzman

Writers:

Mary Higgins Clark (novel)
Peter Mohan (writer)

Genre:

Crime | Mystery | Thriller

Tagline:

When a popular professor is murdered, a prosecutor follows a trail of evidence to a young and pretty student. Is she just another innocent victim? Or could the teacher's pet be a ruthless, remorseless killer?

Plot:

A young woman, seemingly good but still psychologically disturbed from being kidnapped as a little girl, becomes the obvious suspect in a murder. |

Plot Keywords:

Murder | Kidnapping | Multiple Personality | Child Kidnapping | Amnesia

Cast

Nastassja Kinski	...	Karen Grant
Kim Schraner	...	Laurie Kinmount
Andrea Roth	...	Sarah Kinmount
Michael Shanks	...	Justin Donnelly
Ellen Dubin	...	Carla Hawkins aka Opal
Ron Lea	...	Brendan Moody
Kevin Jubinville	...	Allan Grant
Tobias Moretti	...	Billy Hawkins aka Bic
Hannah Lochner	...	Young Laurie Kinmount
Jim Thorburn	...	Gregg Bennett
Dawn Greenhalgh	...	Anne Webster
Ann Baggley	...	Vera West
Bob Desrosiers
Anne Thornley-Brown	...	Prison Matron
Sadie LeBlanc

Also Known As:

Nous n'irons plus au bois (Canada: French title) (France)
Mary Higgins Clark's 'All Around the Town' (USA) (complete title)

MPAA:

Rated PG-13 for thematic material and violence.

Runtime:

95 min

Country:

Canada | UK | France | USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Australia:MA (DVD rating) | Germany:o.Al. | USA:PG-13

Filming Locations:

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Company:

Alltime Entertainment

Quotes:

Justin Donnelly: Your sister's manifesting a condition called dissociative identity disorder, DID for short. It means she has multiple personalities.
Sarah Kinmount: What?
Justin Donnelly: There's nothing to be afraid of. In fact, it's quite remarkable. A child powerless against abuse often creates other personalities or alters to survive the trauma.
Sarah Kinmount: As a defense mechanism?
Justin Donnelly: Exactly. The alters help the child say, this isn't happening to me, it's happening to someone else.

A mess indeed

I may be one of the very few people in the world who have never read a Mary Higgins Clark book and I have no idea if this is a faithful adaptation, but if it is, it sure won't be an incentive for me to run to the bookshop. This movie is just an average thriller whose cruel lack of originality is hardly masked by purely artificial "complexity". Actually, it really looks like the writers took almost all of the cliches of the genre and threw them into the mix : intertwined stories of kidnapping and murder, suspect with "multiple personalities", creepy couple of bad guys, understanding sister, wonderful shrink, cunning private investigator, angry boyfriend, jealous woman : all these elements loosely combined together cannot be considered as a plot, sorry. The acting, doesn't do much to help this lousy story : while the actress who plays Laurie does a decent job (despite the fact that she yells a lot), Nastassja Kinski delivers a remarkably poor performance : apparently, she doesn't give a damn and keeps her eyes half-closed during the entire movie. I guess she just needed the money. To conclude, I would only recommend this to die-hard Clark fans who will probably dig it. I for one will wait a long time until I get one of her novels or watch another adaptation of them.