Customer Reviews: MOTHER FIXATIONFebruary 19, 2005 Michael Butts(Martinsburg, WV USA) 2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The most compelling aspect of this made for Canadian TV thriller is the adoption angle. William McNamara plays a young man who was given away by his mother at birth and unfortunately has developed a psychosis in seeking revenge on her for abandoning him. We first meet him as a little boy who sets fire to his current set of parents. Next, he's a bright, apparently indisposable executive assistant to stockbroker Donald Sutherland. We know things are a little weird though when McNamara brutally attacks the man whose job he took in the elevator and then makes it look like he is the victim. It soon dawns on us that McNamara has other sordid plans in the offing. We learn that Sutherland's second wife (his first died in a car accident) gave away her first child as she was only seventeen and wasn't ready for motherhood. Put two and two together and you'll see where the film is heading.
Sutherland is a little more animated and upbeat than usual; Lesley Ann Warren is very good as his wife and McNamara's birth mother. Joe Pantoliano and Tia Carrere have supporting roles but aren't sufficient enough to affect the film itself. McNamara chews up the scenery, trying to combine a calm gentlemanly young man with his obvious psychotic outrages. Most of the time it works for him but his inexperience shows in his final scenes, but strangely enough NATURAL ENEMY was a highly competent thriller that kept me involved and intrigued.
nurtural killerMay 28, 2001 Peter Shelley(Sydney, New South Wales Australia) 1 out of 4 found this review helpful
This Canadian TVM directed by Douglas Jackson is beautifully lit and features an unusual idea for the serial killer genre. We are told that studies show that violent criminals who have been victims of child abuse are often adopted children, so this thriller takes a huge swipe at the adoption industry by making the protagonist an abused adopted child who wants to direct his violent energies towards his natural mother. Even though this premise indulges in the preposterous assumption that women who give up their babies for adoption do so as an act of selfishness, it still gives the material a queasy fascination, even in spite of a screenplay that's only freshness is in the perverse twists of fate that serial killers always seem to prosper from. Jackson's casting is mixed, with a bearded Donald Sutherland remarkably more animated than usual, but Lesley Ann Warren miscast. Her little girl voice and fine-boned neurosis are more suited to single women in distress or girlfriends at best. Jackson errs greatly in casting William McNamara, since we know him as the Copycat killer, and because McNamara isn't too subtle. Since he plays his murderous intention all the time, we're amazed that the others can possibly begin to trust him, though his obvious line readings actually score an unintentional laugh when he yells "Happy Mother's Day" in a non-celebratory moment. The treatment has it's share of ridiculous touches. Someone speaks without being aware of a video camera on tripod filming them, a case history is confided to a person the speaker has never met before, there is a gay plot point which is inexplicable, an odd scene where Warren is enclosed in a curtained booth in a hospital room, and a song on the soundtrack "No one ever loved me like you". However Jackson delivers a verbal editing cut from Sutherland speaking to someone in one room then speaking to the same person in another, and we get a nice interior pan of windows leading to Warren in darkness knocking.
matricide is suicideMay 22, 2001 Peter Shelley(Sydney, New South Wales Australia) 0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This Canadian thriller directed by Douglas Jackson is beautifully lit and features an unsual idea for the serial killer genre. We are told that studies show that violent criminals who have been victims of child abuse are often adopted children, so this thriller takes a huge swipe at the adoption industry by making the protagonist an abused adopted child who wants to direct his violent energies towards his natural mother. Even though this premise indulges in the preposterous assumption that women who give up their babies for adoption do so as an act of selfishness, it still gives the material a queasy fascination, even in spite of a screenplay that's only freshness is in the perverse twists of fate that serial killers always seem to prosper from. Jackson's casting is mixed, with a bearded Donald Sutherland remarkably more animated than usual, but Lesley Ann Warren miscast. Her little girl voice and fine-boned neurosis are more suited to single women in distress or girlfriends at best. Jackson errs greatly in casting William McNamara, since we know him as the Copycat killer, and because McNamara isn't too subtle. Since he plays his murderous intention all the time, we're amazed that the others can possibly begin to trust him...
