The heroine and narrator, Laura Chant (Erana James), is a Christchurch, New Zealand teenager living with her single mother Kate (Melanie Lynskey) and her adorable kid brother Jacko (Benji Purchase) in the aftermath of an earthquake. She has otherworldly powers, but they're undeveloped and largely unacknowledged by her. We glimpse them in the movie's early narrated sequences (which suggest a nonexistent Terrence Malick horror film) and in moments when she seems to communicate telepathically with a handsome but unnervingly intense classmate named Sorensen Carlisle (Nicholas Galitzine).
The story kicks into gear when Carmody Braque (Timothy Spall), a soft-spoken loner who lives in the local rail yard, befriends Jacko, inviting him into the trailer where he stores his prize collection of dolls and stuffed animals. Carmody is an affable fellow, and Spall plays him in a way that keeps both Laura and the audience off-balance: at first it's hard to tell if he's truly dangerous or if it's our paranoid imagination assuming the worst. A key theme established early by co-directors Miranda Harcourt and Stuart McKenzie is the importance of young people, girls especially, learning to trust that inner voice that tells you that you're in danger, even when the person triggering that alarm—and perhaps the society that enfolds all of us—is insisting that everything is okay. Even the heroine's mother gaslights her, though of course without meaning to; Lynskey plays her as a woman who only wants what's best for her children, based on her own understanding of reality.
Carmody is, in fact, a very bad man. He declares himself Jacko's special friend and caretaker, lures him back to his hideout, and marks him with an ink stamp that lets him enter the boy's soul and control him like a puppet.
Did you get a chill just now? I did, and I've already seen the movie.
From there, "The Changeover" becomes a kind of supernatural detective story, with Laura feeling guilty over disregarding that voice and letting Carmody...well, "violate" is a strong word, but what happens between him and Jacko absolutely feels like a violation—an unholy breach of trust between adult and child. It's not physical or sexual abuse by any traditional definition if the phrase, but feels somehow equally vile. Carmody makes it clear that he's been doing this kind of thing for a long time (an early Freudian slip refers to an event that happened a thousand years ago) and will continue doing it because no one is strong enough to stop him.
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