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Tom Kemp.
Director: Michael Cuesta
Cinema: Eastgate
Running time: 92 Minutes
Type of film: Mystery: Medical and Homicidal.
By Prof Joel White
The medical-murder mystery film “Tell Tale”, with an adults only rating, is clearly not for every adult.
The dictionary defines the word “squeamish” as “easily shocked, sickened, nauseated, offended or disgusted”.
Such movie-goers, albeit adult, would do well to avoid this one.
At the film’s opening we are introduced to a dysfunctional family. We never learn what happened to the mother, or when it happened. We have an apparently switched on young father; his employment, if any is never mentioned with a six-year-old typical Hollywood cutie daughter, Jenna.
In the opening scene, and in the most graphic, minute detail, we witness the father, Terry Bernard, receive a heart transplant. This operation requires and involves a complete opening of the chest wall and reattachment of myriad veins and arteries.
With this procedure we are introduced to Terry, who, throughout the film, suffers from the condition in which the donor’s heart is inappropriate, or, if it is a Hollywood film, is “jinxed”.
Over time we learn that the heart became available when a young husband and wife – whom we never meet are murdered in a robbery. In Hollywood terms we thereby come to know that this heart is a no-no and, for most of the film it brings only tragedy and sadness to its recipient.
On the good side it has the effect of calling him to the attention and affection of the young, beautiful doctor (played by Lena Headey), Elizabeth Clemson, who is treating the adorable daughter for a congenital skin condition. The script and plot requires us to believe and accept that this gorgeous and talented doctor, totally unattached, falls desperately in love with her six-year-old patient’s father, who, at this point in the film, is on his deathbed. Later, her inexplicable devotion is maintained right on through her lover’s commission of three cold-blooded murders in his quest to learn the name of the donor whose heart he carries.
Based on the book “The Body Revealed”, this film, in fact, gives the viewer more inside knowledge about the red stuff that flows within him than he wishes to know.