Plot
The film opens with Martin playing catch with his young mentally challenged brother, Pete, at a special school in London. Martin is the only thread to Pete's family life; their father died years before and their mother has a new life with a new husband. Martin expresses concern for his brother's well-being to the school's physician, who is comfortable with Pete's progress.
After the title sequence, Martin is shown in a toy store, gazing at Susan, who purchases a toy. As she leaves, Martin follows. Two undercover store detectives ask them to return to the manager's office. The detectives assert that Martin and Susan were working together to allow Martin to steal a toy. Susan assures them she has never met Martin. The manager asks Susan for her address, and Martin appears to make a mental note when she offers it. When questioned by the manager, Martin turns soft, presents himself as mentally challenged, and calls himself "Georgie." Sympathetic to him, Susan pays for the toy. Certain that this was a misunderstanding, the manager lets them leave.
Martin returns home to his parents arguing in the parlor over his lack of interest in life. There is allusion to some perverse behavior he has exhibited, though this is not elaborated upon. He shuts himself in his room. While secluded, Martin stares in the mirror, bare chested, examining his frame. He seems disappointed at his appearance, eventually punching and cracking the mirror in frustration. The camera reveals a stack of body building magazines on Martin's dresser.
The next day, Martin goes to Susan's house and waits for her to return. She arrives with a young Indian man named Shashee. He drops off Susan, who thanks him, and she goes to the library, where she keeps an after-school job. There, Martin approaches Susan who immediately recognizes him as 'Georgie'. He tells her that he followed her and pays her back for the toy. Before he leaves, Martin, as Georgie, gets Susan to lend him a book about animals.
Martin has a heated conversation with his stepfather, who insists he travel to Australia. Martin refuses, then sets in motion a plan to leave home, pretend to go to France, and then go on to live with Susan. Martin leaves his family and shows up late at Susan's mother's house, where she rents rooms. Presenting himself as Georgie, he gains sympathy both from Susan and her mother and they let him stay.
The plot unravels with Martin's duplicitous nature clashing against his desires to win Susan's heart. He wants her to accept him as a lover, but cannot reveal that he is in fact Martin, as he is worried she will shun him. Meanwhile, Martin uses his new-found identity to his advantage to seek out revenge on his stepfather, who believes he is in France. This series of decisions leads Martin down the path of self-destruction.
Read more about this topic: Twisted Nerve
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
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““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)