Review: Surveillance (2/5)

Surveillance
(Jennifer Lynch):
Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman, Pell James, Ryan Simkins
Running time: 97 minutes (16)

Here’s a film to send your jaw crashing to the floor – a black-humoured, macabre piece of audience bait disguised as a horror-thriller. Surveillance takes Rashomon and plants it in creepy Americana. It becomes Blue Velvet meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Two FBI detectives (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) arrive into town to investigate some grisly murders. The local cops are bent and loopy, there’s a drug-addled woman (Pell James) and a small child (Ryan Simkins). All are witnesses to a scene of carnage but none of their stories fit. The director is Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David, and she borrows shamelessly her father’s weird, unsettling style. She is precise with her camera and works up a jaunty yet disturbing tone. She wants to dislocate the viewer and to shock the middle classes. It turns from sadomasochism into total nihilism. You watch a woman, blue in face, being strangled to death while another woman sticks her tongue in her mouth. It wants to be outrageous, to have no moral boundaries whatsoever. It shrinks from harming the child, which, of course, is a good thing. But it just shows that the film is constrained by the same values it wants to mock.