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These captures are from Johnny Moronic’s video, which is more than 13 minutes long.

Johnny Moronic’s comments

“Alexandra’s Project is a 2003 domestic thriller set over the course of Steve’s (Gary Sweet) 45th birthday. As he gets ready for work he spends some time with his kids and there’s a little bit of tension between him and his wife Alexandra (Helen Buday) but nothing seems too out of the ordinary. As soon as he leaves for work, Alexandra tells the kids they aren’t going to school and they can help her prepare for their father’s birthday celebrations. Steve has a good day at work and leaves expecting a celebration but he arrives home and finds the house deserted with the electricity cut off except for the television and the VCR. He also sees a video camera set up on a tripod and a birthday gift. He opens it and finds a video with a message to play it. Steve watches and is greeted with a striptease from his wife before she sits down and starts talking about their relationship. Boring!!! So he fast-forwards the video and what he sees next will begin a night of viewing he’ll never forget for a long time. A simple premise from director Rolf de Heer (numerous movies most notably Bad Boy Bubby) but an insanely intriguing one that delivers multiple gut punches as we watch Steve’s life implode on videotape. Both Sweet and Buday are excellent in what is basically a two-hander after the first twenty minutes where it’s just Sweet reacting to what he’s seeing on the tape. Buday spends most of the movie wearing not very much and it must’ve been a hell of an effort to get all the beats right. On rewatch, there’s one or two hints early in the tape as to what’s to come but you’d barely notice them on first watch. The twists are wild and leave Steve who started by thinking he had everything with nothing, his whole life stripped of what he thought he held dear. I hadn’t seen the movie since I capped it back in 2004 (so almost 20 years and my memory is I think I saw in theatres back in the day) but it’s still works after all this time.

One of the reasons I haven’t re-capped it until now is I was kind of hoping it would come out in HD but sadly that doesn’t seem to be happening. de Heer is such an eclectic filmmaker which makes his movies a hard sell for the general public, I mean even his most known movie, Bad Boy Bubby is not an easy watch (the first 30 minutes alone would wipe out most of the audience hence why it only has a decently sized cult following). Alexandra’s Project is a little more accessible than that movie but just never clicked outside of his usual audience. I’ll never understand how things get an audience…

As far as the actors go, Gary Sweet is still one of the most prolific actors in Australia while Helen Buday pretty much quit acting after this although she had a pretty sporadic career before starting with Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, which apart from this movie might be he most recognised role. She was also the female lead in de Heer’s 1991 movie Dingo starring Colin Friels and jazz legend Miles Davis.”