Track 29 (1988) • 30 Years Later

A doctor’s wife tires of his obsession with model trains, and spends her days wondering about the son she gave up for adoption at birth.

written by Kim Vertue.

Track 29 is a quirky film by Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now) with tense, vivid imagery and dark suburban humour evoking the work of David Lynch. Upon release in 1988, the late Roger Ebert described it as “unlikeable — perhaps deliberately so. But that doesn’t make it a bad film… and it probably makes it a more interesting one.”

It was produced by George Harrison’s Handmade Films (a company the former Beatle founded to bankroll 1979’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian), boasts a script written by Dennis Potter (Pennies from Heaven), and stars a young Gary Oldman. Yet despite this merging of classic ‘outsider’ British talent, it was a huge failure at the box office, although it won film festival plaudits and, 30 years later, remains as challenging as ever.

The movie charts the crisis of overwrought housewife Linda (Theresa Russell), who’s unhappily married to Dr Henry Henry (Christopher Lloyd) because he’s…