Another film currently showing in Toronto, but one that we haven’t heard too much about is Jonathan Teplitzky’s The Railway Man. And why is that? Based on the first official trailer, the film has all the trappings for commercial success: Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Stellan Skarsgard, WWII and a bevy of emotions to keep you invested in hearing this story play out.
Firth plays Eric Lomax, a WWII soldier captured in Singapore and held in a Japanese POW camp, where he and his fellow soldiers were brutally tortured after they refused to help build the Thai-Burma Railway. Flash forward to after the war, when Firth has survived and is trying desperately to find a sense of normalcy in life and overcome what happened in the camp – which his wife (Kidman) wants to understand in some way. Coping for Lomax appears to partly means tracking down his captor and dishing out what he was served. Check out the trailer below.
The trailer itself is beautiful, full of gorgeous landscapes, emotional music cues and Firth sobbing. Now, it’s satisfying that Lomax (who is a real person, by the way; the film is based on his memoirs) sets out for revenge, but this is no action flick; there’s a sense of sadness and pain even as he flicks that knife open for the first time. Whether or not he’ll go through with it remains unseen, but something tells me a lesson in compassion is coming for all involved. Doesn’t it seem like that kind of movie?
The Railway Man opens in theaters in Australia on December 26th. There is no US release date at this time.
