October Gale

Ruba Nadda's thriller "October Gale" is a grab-bag of fun stuff, some of which is not usually found in the same film. First and foremost, the film offers a sensible, calm, smart female protagonist -- someone who keeps her wits and makes understandable choices, rather than being a typical movie nitwit of the stripe who goes into dark cellars when ghouls and serial killers are on the loose.

Then again, Helen (Patricia Carkson) is a woman of middle years -- a physician with decades of life experience, including a marriage lasting more than thirty years to her recently deceased husband (played in flashback by Callum Keith Rennie). She's not apt to lose her cool and go running through storm-lashed woods like some dizzy scream queen.

Good thing, too, because William, the handsome young man who fetches up on shore near her isolated island cabin, is suffering a gunshot wound to the shoulder -- and not the usual pain-free, doesn't-interfere-with-your-mobility wound that seems a staple in action flicks. He screams, writhes, creeds, and curses while Helen vacillates between ministering to him and washing her hands. The injured man is played by Scott Speedman, formerly of the TV naval drama "Last Resort," where he played a clean-cut submarine XO. Here, he manages to handle small boats just fine, but he's not exactly officer material. It takes a while to figure out his deal -- is he a drug mule? A secret agent? The answer, when it comes, is far more prosaic, which is in keeping with the film's down-to-earth sensibilities. He's a decent guy with a tendency -- or so we're told -- toward berserker rages. The result of one such outburst put him in jail, but now that he's done his time there's a vengeful man (Tim Roth) looking to serve him an extrajudicial death sentence.

Helen, drawn into William's troubles and at risk of becoming collateral damage in a lethal, amoral alpha-male showdown, goes through a range of reactions -- fear, rage, energetic preparation for the arrival of bad guys she knows are on their way in spite of a storm very much like the one in which her husband perished less than a year before. Clarkson plays her beautifully.

Speedman is handsome, and he plays his character as someone abashed and all but without hope, but he's not nearly as interesting as either Helen or the sociopathic, scenery-chewing Roth. In one of the script's few missteps, he's also a bit of female fantasy fodder; Helen doesn't seem like the sort who'd be a cougar, but the film skates dangerously close to such territory, which undermines all the work that's gone into establishing Helen's serious, substantial character, the isolation of the island (key to the film's suspense), and the gravity of the peril William brings to her door. Strange how we can believe in an errand of vengeance as cold-bloodedly over the top as Roth's, only to have our suspended disbelief upended Speedman's too-shy flirtations. But it's the flaw that grinds hard against the film's otherwise silky-smooth atmospherics: Yes, Helen is lonely, but she's also still bereaved. Even if she needs some passion in the depths of her grief, is she really going to go for someone who is about the same age as her son, Henry (Eric Murdoch), whom she's left back in Toronto so that she can get some alone time?

Nothing in the way the film is put together supports this. The cool, blue-toned lighting scheme by cinematographer Jeremy Benning and Mischa Chillak's carefully restrained score resist hysterics, aligning with the theme of loss but also dampening misplaced hints of sexual passion. This is a thriller that's done in an old-school manner, with growing tension rather than a series of cheap, escalating shocks. Yes, the movie is 85% believable, but it's also got something like 5% Nicholas Sparks by volume, and that's enough to put a guy off just about any film.