I became her caregiver for the rest of her life. While her physical injuries healed, she remained deeply psychologically scarred. One of my most potent memories is cleaning my niece’s blood out of Margaret’s hair once we brought her home from the emergency room. My mother-in-law was shot in the arm protecting a child. He purchased the gun either the day before or the day of the shooting. Dave felt incredibly threatened and angry to be excluded from childhood events, such as starting school. My husband and I helped Laura move out and go through the legal process of gaining a restraining order. Their marriage had a very unsafe and unhealthy power dynamic. And at this point, we didn’t know if Dave was on his way to our house, as he was quite angry that we had encouraged the separation.

Laura and the girls were dead, and Margaret, my mother-in-law, was at the hospital. The next day, I came home from work at lunchtime to a message on my answering machine: Dave, Laura’s estranged husband, had shown up at her house with a gun. She was so excited, but also quite nervous. The night before the oldest, Sarah, started kindergarten, I arranged a party where we filled her backpack with love notes. I’d always wanted to be an auntie, and my husband’s sister Laura gave us a little quiver of nieces: Sarah, Rachel, and April. Doreen Dodgen-Magee Psychologist and Author | Scotts Mills, Oregon As if the writers wanted the characters and the to suffer the in same catatonic climate. For a film about a dangerous liaison I found the proceedings deeply dull. It’s as though no real blood flows through its veins.īy the time the languid saga limps to its finale I couldn’t care less what happens to Marayaka or Alex who made his mother move to a motel place so that she wouldn’t be attacked at home by the villains. But the film is tragically lifeless and anaemic. While the film struck me as being woefully inert at its core and devoid of beating heart, I found the film’s breathtaking landscape to be well employed by director Nicholas Woods.Yup, he does make effective use of the panoramic landscape. But she does seem fairly determined to make her way around her hostile world using her womanly wile while it works. I am not to sure if Marayka actually does any of those two things, wring her hands or bite her lips. It is astounding how cretinous some men get around distressed women who just have to wring their hands and bite their lips for us to be putty in their pretty palms. Of course freedom is a myth, specially when you have your dark past chasing you. Marayka, an immigrant on the run, not only convinces Alex to help her get rid of her tormentor’s tail, she even convinces him to take off with her to a destination where her enemies can’t find her. A sedate real-estate agent named Alex(Hestor Horwin) the hero invites MsTrouble right into his home. Because that’s what he does right till the end.For all the screechy tyres and paranoid wheels,nowhere did I feel any real danger lurking around the heroine.Ī classic Damsel in Distress dressed up as a woman of contemporary American, Marayka(Michaela Russell) is the cinematic equivalent of a trainwreck.

I suspect even the writers of this supposedly sinister yarn couldn’t care a damn what the guy chasing the heroine is called.įor all we know the actor went through the entire film being called by his real name Chase.

In the film I couldn’t care less what he was called. But I saw humorous irony in the name of the actor who plays the villain chasing the heroine across the Sedona desert. Starring Michaella Russell, Heston Horwin,Chase Cargil

Echoes of violence 2021