Beautiful Kate

After a 20-year absence, Ned Kendall (Ben Mendelsohn), a 40-year-old novelist, returns to his outback childhood home bringing his fiancée, Toni (Maeve Dermody), a sexy trashbag half his age. He's come for some kind of reckoning with his dying dad, Bruce (Bryan Brown) and younger sister Sally (Rachel Griffiths); family secrets lie buried concerning his deceased siblings, twin sister Kate (Sophie Lowe) and younger brother Cliff (Josh McFarlane). Rachel Ward's directorial debut is well acted and handsomely shot by Andrew Commis, but it goes nowhere. Having arrived at the house and shown off his empty-headed girlfriend, Ned has nothing to do but brood and wait for Bruce to die while flashbacks conveniently fill in the story. Any surprises these flashbacks might have contained are telegraphed well in advance in Ward's script, adapted from a novel by the American writer Newton Thornburg. This story of illicit desire lacks juice.