The Broken Shore

The Broken Shore (telemovie) - Adelaide Film Festival (October 15 2013) and ABC (February 2 2014).

Catherine plays: Erica Burgouyne.

The Broken Shore is a pretty good telemovie. The screenplay and the acting does justice to the book on which it is based (by Australian author Peter Temple). There is one thing it does focus on more than the book, and that is the romance between Joe Cashin (Don Hany) and Helen Castleman (Claudia Karvan); it almost took over at times.

Catherine's character is Erica Burgouyne, the step-daughter of murdered man Charles Burgouyne, who is brutally bashed in his own home. In the book, Erica is quite defensive when questioned by Joe, and she is certainly like that in the movie as well. What was a bit disappointing to me, is that she only has two scenes in this, whereas in the book she is in it more than that. Catherine's second scene as Erica is excellent though, as she gets quite emotional while talking to Joe in an old theatre (Catherine seems to be quite good at emotional scenes in general!). It also becomes clear that Erica (more than likely) knew who killed her step-father from the very beginning.

I guess because Catherine doesn't have a lot of screen time in this, it limits what I can write in this review. I would have been happy to see more of Erica because she did seem interesting and also a little mysterious. There were also some parts of the book which involved her that would have been good to see on screen (as a bit of an example, see the excerpt from the book below)!

***½