Simply A Masterpiece

best movie i've ever seen.

Admirable film.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Hallam Foe could only be made in Britain. I could hardly see Hollywood film producers green-lighting a film that is about a reclusive, obsessive peeping tom who crossdresses and breaks and enters other people's property. And yet, he - Hallam Foe (aka Jamie Bell from Billy Elliot fame) - is our hero and, stranger still, we root for him.He gets in all sorts of trouble when he leaves his father and stepmother to go and live and work in Edinburgh, where he meets someone who looks like his late mother and then starts a relationship with her.The soundtrack is great and goes well with the beautiful shots of Edinburgh city from on high. There's not much of a story and normally that sounds like a negative. If you ask me what it was about, I can't really say - other than I loved it. It's touching without ever being sentimental and you actually care about the damaged characters you're watching.Plus there's a great scene that lists all the names you'll ever need to know concerning - well - body parts (if you know what I mean).

Seventeen year-old Hallam Foe is a weird teenager that misses his mother, who committed suicide, drowning in a lake nearby their house in Edinburgh after an overdose of sleeping pills. Hallam spends his spare time peeping at the locals and blames his stepmother Verity Foe, accusing her of killing his mother. After a discussion with his father Julius Foe, Hallam sneaks out from his house and travels to Edinburgh, where he sees Kate Breck and becomes obsessed with her because of her resemblance to his mother. Kate hires Hallam to work in the kitchen of the hotel where she works and they have a strange romance, while Hallam reaches his maturity the hardest way....Now this could be classed as a kind of Psycho for snobs. Yes, it's very impressive to look at, and the performances are great, but it concentrates too much on the mother fixation to convince us that this is some kind of psychedelic coming of age movie, or the Anti-Ferris Beuller if you would.It's not very nice to watch in some scenes, and it has a downbeat feel all the way through, But Bell and Miles put some much needed human elements into it, thanks to their decidedly weird relationship.The soundtrack is absolutely amazing, and just about saves the film, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense unfortunately, it's just a film about a boy who cannot forget about his mother, tries to get away from it, finds a woman who looks like his mother, watches her have sex, and in the last minute of the film decides not to dwell and find himself instead.A bit bland to be honest.

it is great to see jamie bell develop into such a fine actor. his performance in this lacklustre film really saved it from being completely unwatchable. it is a pity that his touching performance which was so subtle was not better used.the film doesn't know what it is, is it a peeping tom movie, are we going to discover the murky habitat of a teenage prowler. or is it a coming of age story as a young adolescent learns to deal with his mothers death. the film could neither play up to the sinister suggestions of the beginning or play it down. i kept waiting for something dangerous to happen, feeling that the story was stuck in a boring interlude, until i realised that was the story. a boy falls in love with a girl who looks like his mother - and the imagined murder of her mother was the interlude.well i still rate this film as watchable purely because of jamie bell's beautiful nuanced performance but for nothing else

The boy has issues. Hallam Foe(Jamie Bell) hates his new stepmom, but it doesn't stop him from doing her, in a tree-house, no less. The young lad hates Verity(Claire Forlani) because he suspects her of killing his mother. That's why the sex is so shocking, and more disturbingly, erotic, because sex with the mother surrogate might be some fulfillment of a deep-rooted craving for his real mom. Initially, the tree-house episode starts off as a half-hearted murder attempt. Hallam grabs her neck; the stepmother retaliates by grabbing his c***, then baser instincts take over. As they rut like pigs on the floorboards, there's the added luridness of the dead mother's likeness overlooking their unwholesome coupling. Hallam hangs a poster-sized image of his mother, in which she looks more like a woman instead of a parent. Shot in black and white, the mother could be modeling a fragrance. For the Oedipus complex to be fully realized as a central theme in "Hallum Foe", however, the boy needs to make an overture towards killing his father. The fact that Hallum has no such murderous intentions with Julius Foe(Cirian Hinds), speaks to the filmmaker's timidity with the matter of his son's psycho-sexual problems. "Hallum Foe" is kinky, but not too kinky, and ultimately, not too honest about the delicate subject that is incest.Hallam Foe needs a new scene, so he leaves the Scottish countryside and moves to Edinburgh, leaving behind his mother issues. Hallam Foe needs a girl. Alas, the first girl that catches the young man's eye just happens to be his mother's doppleganger; he follows Kate(Sophia Myles) to the hotel where she works as a human resources specialist. She hires Hallam as a kitchen porter. He's smitten. She's smitten, too. Soon, the lad is up to his old voyeuristic ways, spying on her from behind a clock face in the hotel's attic, which offers up a perfect view of her apartment. At times, "Hallam Foe" suggests what "Back to the Future" would look like if Alfred Hitchcock directed it. In the Robert Zemeckis film, the Michael J. Fox character goes back in time and meets his mother(Lea Thompson) as a contemporary, as a pre-maternal woman. They're simply Marty and Lorraine. In a parked car, Marty watches in awe as his mother drinks and smokes. He could have her. In "Hallum Foe", the boy looks out of a crack in the clock's face, which could be suggested as a rift in time that allows Hallum to have what Marty had, a chance to know his mother as a nubile. After Hallum watches Kate have sex with her boss, in the very next scene, he's perusing one of his mother's old birthday greetings. Since Hallum eventually beds Kate, the sight of the mother's double having rough sex with another man would seem to indicate that his covert witnessing triggered a feeling of longing that's both romantic, and parental.In the film's most pivotal scene, "Hallam Foe" evokes Hitchcock's "Vertigo" when Kate wears the dress of Hallam's dead mother. The boy bursts into tears, then cuts away to the two lovers lying in bed. To a certain extent, the filmmaker shrinks back from dealing directly with Hallum's psychosis. The most basic question goes unanswered: Does Hallum accept Kate as a separate entity from his mother? The film is too coy, although the film hints that he's knowingly having relations with his mother, through the use of a key close-up that isolates Kate's eye, an echo of an earlier scene back at the tree-house, in which Hallum tears down his mother's vandalized blow-up, leaving behind a single eye. A brave filmmaker, such as David Lynch, for starters, would crank up the erotic heat once Kate brings Hallum's mother back to life by wearing that dress. If "Vertigo" was made today, and not 1958, Scottie Ferguson(Jimmy Stewart) would nail Judy Barton(Kim Novak) in an instant after raising Madeleine from the dead. Since the film's treatment of their workplace romancing is rendered as cute and healthy, the filmmaker misses a golden opportunity to challenge his objective attitude towards their almost-incestuous relationship by making it unequivocally clear that Kate is Hallum's second chance to indulge in his sexual psychosis, which went unconsummated when the boy's mother drowned. The film's climax, albeit exciting, is all wrong. He goes after the wrong person. By going after the stepmother instead of the father, "Hallum Foe" never fully commits to the idea that the boy thinks Kate is his dead mother. Hallum has a complex all right; it's just not the Oedipus one.The filmmaker pulls too many punches; he tries to make a crowd-pleaser out of some very dark material.