The Second

A mostly engrossing mystery-thriller anchored by terrific performances by Rachael Blake and Susie Porter, though in the end it's a little unmoored by its own unnecessary tricksiness.

"The Second" is a sexy and satisfying thriller that toys with time, memory and the provocative side of storytelling.

This remains, despite the onerous intellectualising, an engaging perspective explored with energy and verve.

From the recent batch of Australian movies, this thriller is one of the most arresting and sophisticated.

Director Mairi Cameron creates an prestige aesthetic that affects a sense of haunting isolation, and writer Stephen Lance's script manipulates time and memory to weave a disturbing tale of creation. What secrets are entangled in this fiction?

Mairi Cameron's feature debut is a pretentious psychodrama with a strong cast struggling to sex it up and a sneaking suspicion that we're all being infuriatingly misled.

This stupendously pretentious Australian drama is so one-of-a-kind awful, making another would just kill its chances of unwittingly becoming a cult/camp classic.

...the plotline unfolds with such a lack of clarity that it is hard to know what The Second saying about the sexual power, or disempowerment, of teen girls.