Ben Mendelsohn: 10 greatest movies of all time
By Rachel Roth
10. Beautiful Kate
Original Release Date: August 6, 2009
Box Office Earnings: $1 million
Critical Reception: Positive reviews from critics and has an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes. Received six awards and 23 nominations, including two Best Actor nominations for Ben Mendelsohn.
About the Role: Ned is a man struggling with something dark. Conflicted, he drinks and works his way through a line of girlfriends because, 20 years ago, his twin sister Kate died in a car accident that also resulted in the suicide of their older brother, Cliff. It’s not only her death that haunts him, but her ghost.
Simply the Best: Based on the book of the same name by Newton Thornburg, Beautiful Kate is about the love blooming within a family trapped in isolation. Living far out in the outback of Australia, a group of siblings grow up discovering their sexual identities together, and in doing so develop taboo relations.
Trapped in a dreary existence underneath their mean father’s thump, Kate and her twin brother, Ned, learn to rely on each other for human connection, eventually resulting in a forbidden affair. Kate is beautiful and wild, head-strong, the light of everyone’s life. No one is resistant to her charms, but the only two people she wants to love her are her brothers.
It’s a heartbreaking story that sounds unsettling but really isn’t once you look past the incest. Kate is dead while the story is being told so she appears in flashbacks viewed through Ned’s eyes, allowing us to see her the way he did.