Jack Be Nimble gained modest genre acclaim when it came out but leaves much to be desired. As a film, it is so incomprehensible in its random plotting, frequent shifts of tone and jumbled melting pots of incongruous genre elements as to be 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 develops a stew of other ideas involving 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 hypnotises his foster family and drives them to humiliating suicides, seems to have strayed in from a totally different film altogether – it is like something out of a Gothic farce. A scene where Bruno Lawrence introduces Sarah 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 the plot incomprehensibilities.
 

Trailer here:-