CLOSED FOR WINTER

BY TIM GRAHAM

Elise (Natalie Imbruglia) has a job and a boyfriend, but spends most of her time ruminating on the day her sister, Frances, disappeared when they were children. Frequent flashbacks indicate Elise’s constant preoccupation with the disappearance. Dorothy, Elise’s seemingly depressive mother, lives in a dilapidated house filled with newspaper clippings about missing children. Elise’s haunted beauty is supposed to make her intriguing, but the inability of Elise and Dorothy to extract themselves from the past – combined with the movie’s somnolent pace – just irritate the viewer, especially when compared with the feisty resolve of the Christine Collins character in the recently released The Changeling to make the most of her life despite a similar horrific loss.