A film in which the villain is a failed composer—that hits close to home!  And it’s the premise (roughly) of the 1987 made-for-TV Australian film Coda (1987).  The film is also notable for its use of women in all the lead roles, which would now be a travesty of wokery, but at the time was mildly interesting (it also works because the women aren’t perfectly strong, tough, and smart; the female police detective, for example, seems pretty incompetent, which rings true).  Regular readers know that yours portly is an avid supporter of all women, so you can be sure that I approved of this artistic decision.

Coda is very much a 1980s film—the outfits, the haircuts, etc.  I imagine Australia is one of those countries that is like Idaho:  it’s ten years behind the United States in terms of fashion and pop culture, but it’s still on the same trajectory.  I might be completely wrong about that, but that is the sense I got watching this flick.

Regardless, Coda is an enjoyable little thriller.  It opens with a women being murdered—gasp!—and a goofy passer-by—the lead character’s ex-husband—is framed up for the job when he attempts to offer the dying woman aid.  No good deed goes unpunished, it seems, and the female police detective is convinced the ex-husband is the culprit.  Surprisingly, the ex-wife/lead protagonist doesn’t believe her bumbling ex-husband could be the culprit and begins her own investigation.

Into this mix is a weird female professor at the local college, where the ex-wife is taking classes as a music student and composer.  The female professor is clearly into the ex-wife, who the prof claims is struggling with her sexuality (she gives the police this little tidbit, but it is never shown to be the case, which suggests the prof is projecting her own desires onto her student).  The lead protagonist politely declines invitations to stay with the professor in her strange house, which resembles a bunker on the beaches of Normandy overlooking the crystal blue Australian seas.  It’s pretty obvious that the lead is onto the prof’s lesbianic advances, but avoids allowing them to escalate to more than uncomfortable, weird soliloquies from the professor.

Our heroine makes friend with another woman, a bit of a free spirit, and they try to hunt down the suspected killer.  One scene sees the pair at the opera, where they spy the killer watching them from a box on the opposite side of the theatre.  They attempt to encounter him, only find a man in a weird mask dashing away into the byzantine corridors of the opera house.

Things get weirder from there.  The professor tells the heroine of her twin brother who fled to South America after critics panned his compositional magnum opus, Genesis.  It’s pretty clear that the masked figure is the jilted brother come back on a vague killing spree—or is it?

You can probably spot the twist.

Coda is not the most original movie ever, but I very much enjoyed the focus on classical music and opera, and it is a fun little watch if you’re nostalgic for Australian made-for-TV thrillers from the late 1980s.