A Brilliant Conflict

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Direct to video release produced and starring Andy Garcia. Also starring Vincent Kartheiser (Mad Men) and Linda Cadellini (Freaks and Geeks).Definitely a melodrama, slow moving but with some interesting plot points. Vincent Kartheiser is good as the troubled young man, playing both creepy and vulnerable. A young Linda Cardellini is beautiful as always and as anyone who saw Freaks and Geeks knows is excellent as portraying a realistic teenager. She also sings a song. Andy Garcia is a bit subdued but realistic enough in the main role.Overall it's fairly middling. Overly melodramatic at times and the ending is poor. Honestly I enjoyed it mostly because of seeing a few more famous actor's (Kartheiser and Cardellini)in an early role.It's a 2:00 AM on a cable kind of a movie. Not terrible, but not exactly good

Have you ever had something that sounded really great in your head but sounded really lame when you said it out loud? That's what this movie is like. You can understand why The Unsaid seemed like a good story in theory. In the actual telling, though, you can see that it's lacking in so many ways even before the film takes a hard left turn into Idiotville at the end.The movie starts with the suicide of the son of psychologist Michael Hunter (Andy Garcia). The kid is obviously disturbed about something, but Michael and the rest of the family decide that leaving him alone in the house is the greatest idea they've ever heard. The family returns to find him dead in the garage of carbon monoxide poisoning, giving Andy Garcia the chance to yell and carry on the way actors love to do.Three years later, Michael is now sporting a beard bigger than his head. He writes books on psychology and refuses to see patients. His wife has divorced him and his daughter Shelly (Linda Cardellini) has little use for him. That's when Barbara Lonigan (Teri Polo), an old student of Michael's, asks him to help a young man who is about to age out of the state care system. Tommy Caffey (Vincent Kartheiser) appears to be perfectly normal, something Barbara finds doubtful given that Tommy has never expressed any anger or grief over his father killing Tommy's mother when he was a child. At first Michael refuses but, after shaving off the jungle ecosystem growing on his face, agrees to try and get past Tommy's defenses to the secret pain underneath.While that's going on, Tommy manages to sneak out of the state home where he lives and meets Shelly. She, like a lot of young women, mistakes his mental and emotional dysfunction for being all deep and soulful. Tommy seems to like Shelly, but he also uses her to find out about Michael's son and then uses that information to manipulate Michael in their impromptu therapy sessions.I'm sure it's clear how The Unsaid seemed like a good story in theory. You'd think a psychological thriller about a man trying to deal with his own emotional wounds from his son's suicide while helping another troubled young man, only to discover his patient is more violent and crazy than he first thought, would make a great film. It really doesn't, though, and the reasons for that are legion.Let me just touch on a few. The secret of Tommy's pain is so obvious that you'll guess what it is at least 40 minutes before the movie even hints at it. Sitting around waiting for a film to tell you what you already know always sucks. Making it worse this time is that to reveal Tommy's secret, the story first pulls virtually the same secret about Michael's son completely out of the filmmakers collective ass. There's absolutely NOTHING in the story that foreshadows or supports the revelation about Michael's son, yet without it the movie wouldn't be able to reveal Tommy's secret. I don't want to spoil The Crying Game for you, but imagine if 15 minutes before that film's big discovery, the story played out almost the exact same scenario with another character. That's what The Unsaid is like.The movie also never decides if Tommy is a good person with psychological problems or a screwed-up bad person. So, sometimes he behaves like someone who needs to be helped and sometimes he's much more malevolent. That may be realistic, psychologically speaking, but it makes for a fictional character that is muddled and a story without a moral compass. The story wants us to be afraid of Tommy because he does terrible things but also empathize with him. Those two emotions don't easily mix.Vincent Kartheiser does what he can with Tommy, appearing both creepy and vulnerable when the Almighty Plot Hammer requires it. Linda Cardellini and Teri Polo also do fine jobs, but Garcia essentially sleepwalks through his role. He plays Michael Hunter as Generic Thriller Hero, with nothing original at all about the performance.And then we get the crappy ending. The two most common problems in screenplays are having a great beginning and ending but no middle, and having a great buildup but an ending that stinks on ice. The Unsaid is definitely the latter. I am not exaggerating when I say that after trying to be a psychological thriller, it's like the film simply gives up and morphs into a Steven Seagal flick, complete with car chase and armed standoff. I half expected Michael Hunter to sprout a pony tail and start karate chopping people.Finally, let me note that this film is very slow. I mean this….movie….is….very….slow. If you can't get to sleep some night, watching The Unsaid would work better than a glass of warm milk.This movie isn't so aggressively horrible that you'll want to throw something at your TV. There are just many better examples of this genre that you should be watching instead.

(There are Spoilers) With no one, including members of his family, taking Kyle Hunter's, Trevor Blumas, symptoms of hurt and depression seriously Kyle ends up killing himself from carbon-monoxide poisoning one rainy evening in the family garage. Kyle's dad Michael Hunter, Andy Garcia,who should have known his problems and how serious they were since he's a collage professor in psychology, as well as threats people like Kyle all the time is so devastated by his son's death that he ends up leaving his wife Penny and daughter Selly, Chelsea Fields & Linda Cardellini,to live by himself since he couldn't face them anymore. We later learn the real reason for Kyle's suicide and it shows how right Michael was in feeling guilty about his death and what he had, unconsciously and unknowingly, to do with it. It's now three years later and Michael is getting his life back together, and putting Kyle's tragic death behind him, as he goes on the lecture circuit and is invited to speak at his alma mater Kansas University. It's at Kansas U. that Michael meets one of his former students Dr. Barbara Wagner, Teri Polo, now a licensed psychologist at the Holly Health School for Wayward Boys who asks him about seeing one of her patients 17 year-old Tommy Caffey, Vincent Kartheiser. Hesitant at first Michael agrees to talk to Tommy who's about to be released since he's doing so well, psychology and is about to reach his 18th birthday,at the school. Tommy, almost by accident, get's to know Michael's young teenage daughter Shelly who falls in love with him when she meets Tommy at a dance by the railroad yard when he was out on a night-time leave from Holly Heath. Tommy also murdered a young girl Chole, Kim Schraner, earlier that evening when she aggressively come on to him by the deserted railroad cars not knowing what kind of monster the shy sweet and good looking Tommy really is. Tommy learns all about Shelly's deceased brother Kyle and uses that knowledge to manipulate Michael into , or having his personal psychologist Dr. Wagner, give him a clean bill of health and thus release from the hated, by Tommy, institution.Tommy had developed a murderous hatred of women, or young girls, who try to be intimate with him because of what happened to his mom when he was a young boy; she was brutally murdered by his dad Joseph Caffey, Sam Bottoms, when he found that she was having an affair with another man. The truth behind Tommy's mom's murder, and what caused his dad to keep it secret all these years, is something that Tommy has been trying to keep locked deep inside his mind and that's the reason for his dangerous psychosis that eventually leads to murder and madness.Disturbing but thought-provoking movie that has you almost as shocked as Michael is by the time it's over with Tommy skillfully getting under his skin, and sub-conscious, by morphing himself into Michael's son Kyle and, unknowingly, bringing out the truth behind Kyle's death that Michael, by his actions in trying to help his troubled son, had a lot to do with. Michael begins to realize later the reasons for Tommy knowing so much about Kyle, he's been secretly dating his daughter Shelly, and even more shocking the real reason for his mothers murder that shaped Tommy's mind and turned him into the Dr. Jeckel and Mr. Hyde that he became. The ending of the movie "The Unsaid" is a bit confusing at first with Tommy going wild in his effort to get out of the Holly Health School and almost murdering his psychologist Dr. Wagner and then taking Shelly hostage in the process. But when confronted with the truth by Michael, and seeing that he really needs help, and that a life on the outside will only end with him being either dead or on death row the movie couldn't have ended any other way.

I saw the movie the other night. Actually the only reason I rented it was because I like Andy Garcia. Before spotting it in the video store, I had never heard of the movie before. I thought it was a very good movie. I was surprised at the ending, I thought I had it all figured out, but there was a little twist at the end.