Jack Be Nimble however leaves much to be desired. As a film, it is so incomprehensible in its random plotting, frequent shifts of tone and its jumbled melting pots of incongruous genre elements that it is downright weird. Garth Maxwell never seems to have any idea where the film is meant to be going from one moment to the next – at first it appears to be a straight drama about a psychic link between separated children, then into the stew come telepathic powers and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy with no apparent explanation being able to pick up the voices of the dead. The scene where Alexis Arquette produces his high-school metal-work project, a candle-operated dynamo lantern that hypnotizes the household and drives them to humiliating suicides, seems to have strayed in from a totally different film altogether – it’s like something out of a Gothic farce. A scene where Bruno Lawrence introduces Smuts-Kennedy to marigolds under the pillow as a handy source of psychic amplification verges on the laughable. Maxwell compensates somewhat with an occasionally ambitious visual style in the early scenes – a toy clown placed on young Jack’s cot with its lips sewn up, the dishevelled Gough daughters moving in unison like some ominous chorus of Greek harpies – but eventually he and the film get lost amid his own plot incomprehensibilities.