roger-huss Review of Collision

Collision (2009)

An elegant, intelligent, ultimately feel-good production

[8/10 · 8 November 2014]

Collision is wound up with some satisfyingly unexpected plot resolutions (the pedophile hints are a red herring, the illicit images being pirated editions of Startrek, and the piano teacher's angry gestures, the immediate cause of the pile-up, are caused by a wasp ; the mother-in-law is killed by her son-in-law immediately AFTER the crash ; the Paul McGann figure is revealed as a serial offender but the waitress nevertheless gets to travel in his absence; the race theme, flagged up at the start, is surprisingly undeveloped, as if to say 'we're avoiding clichés here'. In the final episode the rhythmic reprises of the collision are replaced at the end by an undoing of the crash in rewind mode underlining the contingent aspect of the whole ghastly event as the frame couple, policeman and woman, move on with their relationship, implicitly okay-ed by the policeman's disabled daughter. It could have been called Accident, but Collision is a better title because more non-committal. Ultimately an elegant, feel-good, production, with excellent casting.