"Like minds" starts out from a very interesting and engaging premise, whereby we find the 17-year-old Alex charged with shooting his classmate Nigel dead. The police detective in charge of the case (Richard Roxburgh) firmly believes Alex is a psychopath, and asks psychologist Sally Rowe (Toni Collette) to interview him and try to get a confession from him. But Alex is a smart, mysterious and secretive kid, and Sally will quickly be intrigued enough to get personally involved in the case. Little by little, we'll find out there's much more to Nigel's death than the gunshot incident, since Alex will tell Sally that Nigel had, and still has, some strange and powerful form of mental influence on him.
The movie starts out well, but quickly goes downhill, and fast, up to a crashing finale. The first few sequences aside, it never manages to offer anything remotely close to suspense or thrill, even though you can tell it tries hard. The characters are only barely written, and, despite the writers' efforts, Alex and Nigel are little more than the stereotypical teen thriller weirdos with little depth to them. The movie fails at every thing it attempts to be: a psychological study of characters, an "original" thriller involving teenagers, a drama about teen angst in a hostile world... you name it. There are bits and pieces of all those subgenres, but the movie just goes nowhere, and does so at a killing slow pace.
I give this movie three stars because it has such good actors as Richard Roxburgh and Toni Collette (although neither is at their best here), because of the settings (very somber and well made; too bad the story wasn't at par with them) and because the idea was good.
