We stopped watching as the direction and the acting were not good. I am surprised the reviews, or most of them didn't seem to notice.

Why not title this The Alcoholic, since his needs drive the entire narrative?

"The Daughter" is a flawed but involving film "inspired by" Ibsen's "The Wild Duck" and set in a dying Australian lumber town. Director/adapter Simon Stone's scaled back the great Norwegian's gothic plot mechanics quite a bit, but we're still left with an irreducible core of craziness that detonates in the final scenes. The first-rate cast does its best to keep it real until then, however, and during the leisurely exposition, Stone rearranges the setting and the characters' backstories in a convincing way--Ibsen's sinister loft where Old Ekdal blazes away at birds and rabbits becomes a tidy wildlife refuge tended by Sam Neil; Hedvig's an attractive pink-haired teenager, not a pathetic captive...Henry (Jeffrey Rush), the rich millowner whose misdeeds set the plot in motion long ago, doesn't have much left to do at this point; the main characters are his estranged son, Christian (Paul Schneider), and Oliver (Ewen Leslie), Christian's boyhood friend and the son of Henry's onetime business partner (that's Sam Neil). Stone picks up the tempo when Christian unearths a "long-buried family secret" (as the imdb blurb says) and threatens to reveal it. Perhaps because he's concerned that Christian's motives--seemingly a mixture of envy, resentment and a yearning for a higher truth--may not play too well for us moderns, Stone makes him a relapsing alcoholic as well (which I don't think his counterpart, Gregers, is in the play). The rest of the film becomes a blur of dramatic confessions and confrontations as the impact of Christian's betrayal of his friend ripples outwards. Stone's artistic project of restaging Ibsen's heavily symbolic drama in a realistic setting pretty much collapses at this point, but the rock-'em-sock-'em dénouement still held my attention to the end. The woodsy exteriors are appropriately somber, and two of the lesser-known Aussie actors, Ewen Leslie and Odessa Young (Hedvig), are especially impressive.

So everyone in it are good, maybe even terrific. But what could have been a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions ends up being cowardly and lacking in conviction. In the end, just a lousy story that didn't know what story it wanted to tell.