‘Mister Foe’: The Boy Who Cried Mother

With its endearingly misfit teenage antihero, peppy-wistful soundtrack featuring Franz Ferdinand and other indigenous small-label Scottish pop, cult-novel source material, and an absurdist fixation on social taboos (in this case, incestuous frolic and Peeping Tomism), “Mister Foe” could have been hatched by the Quirky Indie Hit Simulator.Traces of everything from “The Graduate” to “Spanking the Monkey,” and from Bill Forsyth’s shaggy-underdog romances to the darker fringes of “Mister Foe” director David Mackenzie’s 2004 film “Young Adam,” glimmer in this coming-of-age story. It’s told through the severely tilted perceptions of a grown-up-looking Jamie Bell (the can-do kid from “Billy Elliot”) as Hallam Foe. He’s a grief-addled 17-year-old who is submerged in the lingering undertow of his mother’s death in a boating accident on the family’s rambling Highlands estate. Hallam suspects his father (Ciarán Hinds) has fallen under the evil spell of his darkly stunning new wife, Verity (Claire Forlani), who, somehow, may be responsible for the mysterious incident on the lake.Hallam has withdrawn into his own world, hiding out in a tree house that he’s turned into a shrine to his mother. To further complicate matters, the birdlike adolescent has become a stealthy voyeur. When Verity clambers up a rope to confront him in his sanctum sanctorum, she proves just how manipulative she can really be, and Hallam discovers that his mother fixation isn’t confined to the dead.Adapted from Peter Jinks’s 2002 novel, with a touch that balances the playful with the gothic, Mr. Mackenzie’s film tracks its pilgrim’s progress out of the trees and into the belfry: Lighting out for Edinburgh, Hallam becomes a crafty homesteader of random rooftops, one whose erratic perambulations lead him across the path of Kate (Sophia Myles), a bright, inviting 30-something woman who captures Hallam’s eye because she looks exactly like his late mother.Hallam follows Kate to the hotel where she runs the personnel department and boldly lands himself a gig as a dishwasher, working his way up the hospitality-industry food chain while devotedly stalking Kate. One thing leads to another and, well, the story unfolds as awkwardly, illogically, and inevitably as such things happen in these kinds of movies.What’s not so inevitable is the way Mr. Mackenzie keeps the outlandish narrative from spinning out of control until it finally needs to. Kate, who is radiant yet complex in Ms. Myles’s portrayal, is not who or what Hallam thinks she is — twice over. And neither, exactly, is Verity, whose reprisal of the wicked stepmother routine in the film’s closing act leads to catharsis and near-catastrophe as the tone shifts from goofy romance to tragic rage. But the extended buildup keeps you guessing.Mr. Bell enjoys the privilege of occupying nearly every frame, and his roof-prowling eccentric — as agile as one of the thieves in “Les Vampires” — embraces his almost cellular weirdness wholeheartedly. Hallam is so profoundly stunted by emotional pain that he can’t grow up. Yet, rather than make him truly freakish, Mr. Bell imbues his character with an air of bravado (or utter self-destructive, if not felonious, foolishness) that is its own virtue.And, when all else fails, cue the music. The sheer likability of the sound track, with tunes marked by a folksy but inchoate rainy-day twinkle, seeps its way into the movie’s psychology. The tracks (by Orange Juice, Clinic, Psapp, Woodbine, and even not-Scots such as Juana Molina) function as they do in every “Juno” and “Garden State,” namely as a litmus test for the inner lives of the characters. Yet the filmmakers have the good taste not to turn every errant whimsy into a billboard. Not every child experiences the onset of adulthood in quite so traumatic (or sexually provocative) a fashion. Might as well keep the iPod well-stocked for the ride.

‘Mister Foe’: The Boy Who Cried Mother

‘Mister Foe’: The Boy Who Cried Mother

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