Dementia

Good Intense-ions

Dementia
USA 1955 (possibly earlier)
Directed by John Parker
(or possibly Bruno VeSota)
BFI Blu Ray Zone B

Well now. Dementia is a strange film and reminds me of something I wrote myself when I was a teenager (which I tried to get shot three times and when it was finally shot and halfway through the edit, the videocassette tape was physically lost, quite literally fallen off the roof of a car... so a story fated never to be told). 

Anyway, my woes aside, Dementia was not released when it was made because it was, from what I understand, scaring people and was just too surreal for the perceived public consumption. It was continually denied certification in the US and banned for a while in the UK as well, until a few screeings in the 1970s. I believe an interracial dance scene at a jazz club was also something censors were keen to deny people the right to see (with the legendary Shorty Rogers playing jazz in the sequence).  

So, a black and white, surreal and noirish thriller with, I should add, no dialogue. There was another version a few years later, a bastardised version with cut footage (taking account that this original version is already only 56 minutes long), with a different score and added voice over dialogue, called Daughter Of Horror. This cut is also on the BFI Blu Ray but, out of respect for the original, uncompromised version, I have only watched the original, dialogue free version with a score by George Antheil... I might circle back to the other version at some later point because, at one time, it was better known and perhaps the memory of that led to this version being rediscovered. It’s the Daughter Of Horror version which is being watched by a bunch of teenagers in the original 1958 version of The Blob.

Adding to all the confusion, director John Parker is said to have ‘disappeared’ shortly after... or perhaps he never existed in the first place... although his secretary, Adrienne Barrett, plays the main protagonist in this, known as The Gamin. All of the characters have names like this, cyphers for their function, such as The Evil One, Mother, Father and, in the case of the actor who actually claims to have directed at least half of it, Bruno VeSota... The Rich Man.

And it’s an interesting film, for sure.There’s not a lot of plot and its a fairly abstract story but it does tell a tale, of sorts... and it certainly holds the attention. Antheil’s score features a prominent wordless voice and it sounds very much like a theremin or ondes martenot, specifically the theremin used in one of the two films this one strongly reminds me of... Spellbound. I can’t help but think that the director, whoever it was, was significantly  influenced by the Salvador Dali dream sequence in this classic Hitchcock movie and also, very much so, by the score by Miklos Rosza. And, the other film it reminds me of is another Dali work, his co-creation with Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou. Not just in tone but also in specific moments, such as the importance and focus on a specific severed hand at a couple of points in the narrative (such as it is). 

That story being about a half deranged woman who is living in a world where women seem to be used and abused by men and who ends up killing some specific men... both in her past and during the course of the events which are told as graveyard flashbacks to her childhood. 

A few things of note... firstly two of the actors. Dwarf Angelo Rossitto, who is perhaps best known for his role in Tod Browning’s Freaks but also turns up in films by Al Adamson and the like, plays a newspaper seller... which is a profession he also fell back on in real life between acting jobs, from what I can make out. Another interesting and important name is an uncredited night club patron being played by, of all people, Aaron Spelling. Yep, the same Spelling who would become a giant TV mogul in the 1960s and beyond... and into the mid 2000s... you’ll see his name in lots of credits for shows such as Honey West, Starsky And Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, T J Hooker, Fantasy Island, Hart To Hart, Beverly Hills 90210 and oodles more. 

One last thing... lets talk about the nature of censorship. Anyone watching this now will wonder why a film which has been given a 12 rating by the BBFC was once banned for many decades. Well, it’s interesting because there’s a scene where The Gamin is looking in a mirror and she pulls out a switchblade and, after popping the blade out, looks at it almost lovingly, obviously relishing the lethal potential in the blade while smiling to herself. This attitude, to me, is way more frightening and stronger than any gory death a child might stumble on in, say, a gruesome American slasher movie... but the kind of imagery in those are the things which garner them a stupidly high rating. I think little scenes like this make more of an indelible, psychological impact than any kind of strong graphic imagery so, yeah, you have to wonder just why any censorship other than both self-censorship or parental censorship are allowed to exist. It frightens me that censors can wield such power, especially if they let this movie (which, to be fair, features a severed hand) go out with a 12 rating. Preposterous. 

All in all, though, I would say I really quite liked Dementia and think it would be a good one to programme for an all nighter of dark movies, for sure. I will definitely be watching this one again, at some point. 

Love Lies Bleeding

The Joy Of Flex

Love Lies Bleeding
Directed by Rose Glass
UK/USA 2024
A24

Well Love Lies Bleeding is a very interesting film, to say the least. Lou, played by Kristen Stewart, manages a gym and has a none too great existence... but it’s love at first sight when Jackie, played by Katy O'Brian, comes to pump up her body in preparation for a body building competition to be held in Vegas. After some steroid injecting foreplay, the two become involved but, when Lou’s sister gets badly beaten by her husband (again), something snaps in Jackie’s brain and she tries to put things right in her own way. And did I mention the owner of both that gym and the gun club where Jackie is currently working as a waitress is also the long standing local villain, who also happens to be Lou’s father... played to the hilt by Ed Harris?

If this sounds like a classic set up for a 1940s/50s film noir then, bingo but, here’s the thing, the film is set in the late 1980s (Die Hard is mentioned as being a popular, recent film) and this has a similar feel to one of those retro-noir movies made in the 1980s for sure. But, the other thing about this movie is... it’s the second feature by writer/director Rose Glass, who had a big hit with her wonderful movie Saint Maud a couple of years ago (reviewed by me here). And this next piece of cinematic artistry is a worthy successor to that debut, although it’s in no way aligned with it tonally and this is a much more playful movie, shot through with a much more blatant sense of black humour.

The film looks beautiful, with a rich colour palette and some beautiful camera angles. Glass is not afraid to adopt a birds eye view shot and then hold it for a period of time when she feels it’s appropriate too... which reminded me of certain shots in Hitchcock’s oeuvre from time to time.

It also has a few surprises up its sleeves too with the director bringing in a couple of well placed, healthy doses of cinematic surrealism to throw into the mix, to wrong foot and certainly surprise the audience from time to time. There’s a wonderful moment during the body building contest when Stewart, who isn’t even in the same city, appears a couple of times and makes a truly spectacular entrance in one scene (in a way that totally is what using CGI in cinema should be about). Sometimes these dalliances with surreal occurrences can be excused as hallucinogenic states creeping up on a character due to persistent steroid abuse and at other times... well, there’s a wonderful denouement with Ed Harris which, admittedly goes the way you think it will in terms of deus ex machina outcomes but, spectacularly not in a way many people would see coming. Like the final shot of Saint Maud, this forces the audience to consider the duality of what they are seeing and to find their own interpretation of just what is going on by this point. Which is a nice gift to the viewer and something you can take away with you after the film is done.

Added to all this we have a fetishistic devotion to the way muscles can be pumped up on a body with a truly heightened sense of sound design and which, itself, is a constant foreshadowing for the scene I mentioned with Ed Harris in the previous paragraph. It’s another interesting element of the film that seems almost a throwback to a couple of decades earlier, when Darren Aronofsky was using fast cut montages with enhanced sound design in films like Pi and Requiem For A Dream.

And... while we’re on the subject of Aranofsky, this film is also scored by the composer for those films, Clint Mansell. And it’s got a very distinctive feel to it... sounding a lot more like his early works in terms of commenting on the atmosphere of a scene in a more vibrant way than some of his later stuff. I think he’s consciously, perhaps, trying to sound like something earlier for the sake of the time period of the film but one scene where I was really surprised was in the first sex scene between Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian, where Mansell’s score almost goes into full on 1980s porn soundtrack mode... at least that’s the way it seemed to me. It was a bit ‘off putting’ at first but when I figured out the way it fits in with the aesthetic of the piece, I kinda got into it.

And what more is there to say. Love Lies Bleeding, the second feature length film from Rose Glass, is something which at first feels very familiar but then evolves into something much more challenging to what your expectations might be, I’m pleased to say. I was really drawn into the quirkiness of the project and coupled with doses of sometimes uncomfortable, lethal paranoia, I really had a good time with this movie. I suspect it will totally divide audiences straight down the middle but, that’s okay... that just means a film has a powerful voice and falls closer to being an auteur piece than most. I’m glad that this kind of refreshing, cinematic surprise is still able to get a mainstream release these days and, yeah, I hope it does really well.

Mute

Noir Tender

Mute
2018 UK/Germany
Directed by Duncan Jones
Curzon Soho Screening 24/2/18

Duncan Jones is another one of those directors I've not really been sure of over the years. Kinda liked Moon (reviewed here), kinda didn't like Source Code (reviewed here) all that much and I didn't bother with Warcraft because I've never played the World of Warcraft game on which it's based (although I've heard it's a pretty good movie). I kinda got interested in Mute when I saw the director begin tweeting about it a while back but it's a film I nearly didn't get to see.

Why? One word... Netflix.

I'm not opposed to subscription channels as a whole. They have to make their money and I know Jones talks very highly of them in terms of getting the funding together to make this movie, which has been gestating for a very long time, from what I understand. So good for Netflix on that score. What I do object to is making these things exclusive to a channel as pretty much the only commercial option to both a main stream theatrical release and a physical media release. What that means is that people like myself who either can't justify the expense of subscribing or won't subscribe due to not wanting to what amounts to 'borrowing' a film from someone (via streaming, when it's actually deemed available, that is) as opposed to actually owning your own copy which you can put on your player anytime you want.

Furthermore, it's both a blow against the art of film and also something which is going lose money which the backers could have made back on a physical release.

To explain, films like this deserve to be seen on a cinema screen (especially a film like Mute... I'll get to it in a minute, I promise). They are made to be experienced on a big screen and you lack a little something if you've only watched it on your 'so smart' TV, iPad, computer or mobile phone. This is not what cinema is about. Also, the availability of cinemas in urban centres is a lot more accessible than having to sign up for a channel... especially if you only get to watch TV say, once a month if you're lucky.

As far as the people involved losing money? Well, as I said, not everybody is able to, or wants to, access Netflix. Which means the distribution of films like this are driven underground. I've already been offered a free copy of the movie on disc and at least one stranger on my daily bus ride to and from work just this week has told me about various 'free' streaming channels where I can watch all the newest movies without ever paying a penny. And it's not like I was even asking. So, yeah, I strongly believe Netflix should rethink their "exclusive to" business model because, you know, if people really want to see it without Netflix... I suspect they'll find a way.

Anyway... onto the movie because I got lucky on this one and spotted that the Curzon chain of cinemas in the UK have organised 'one a day' screenings of the film and I managed to get myself to one of these. Of course, the irony here is that the ticket cost me much more than the price of a month's subscription to Netflix but, having seen how visually rich and striking this one is, I'm kinda really glad I got to see it at the natural environment for the art of film... the cinema.

Out of the, admittedly small, amount of this director's films I've seen to date, I think Mute is my favourite.

The film starts as strongly as it continues with the main protagonist Leo as a boy where we see just why he is, as the title of the movie says, mute. We also see that the quaker family he was born into does nothing concrete to stop this condition from remaining and that's really all we need to know about this background so the rest of the movie, set many years later, shows Alexander Skarsgård  playing Leo, who works as a barman in a night club with his girlfriend Naadirah, played by Seyneb Saleh.

The story is set in the future and it seems to be around the same time that Jones' first feature, Moon was set. I know this because Sam Rockwell reprises his role as both Sam Bell and his clones in a cameo (basically making this movie MOON 2, in all but name). It would be true to say this futuristic environment in which this old 1940s style noir plot plays out is an extremely well crafted future version of Berlin. It would also be true to say that, with its occasional flying cars, overpopulated cityscapes and neon candy lighting, the film pays more than a little homage to Ridley Scott’s early masterpiece Blade Runner (reviewed by me here). In fact, it looks so much like it that it’s way much more true to the look and feel of that movie than the official sequel which was released last year. Mute truly captures the ‘designer gritty’ spectacle that Blade Runner 2049 (reviewed here) was lacking, as far as I’m concerned.

The film has a wonderful set up which gives you a glimps into the romance between the two main characters before going into a somewhat clichéd but no less effective film noir style mystery... as Naadirah goes missing and Leo has to try and discover what’s been going on in her life for this to happen and try to find her. It’s a simple set up and it follows a clear path towards an end goal while showcasing a credible world of future wonders and sleazy corruption.

The actors are razor sharp too.

This is one of Alexander Skarsgård’s greatest performances, if not his best, as he uses his facial expressions and body language to portray what’s going on in the head of the main protagonist. Seyneb Saleh is wonderful but, sadly, not in the film as much as I would have liked. Then you have Ant-Man himself, Paul Rudd, playing a kind of gangster’s doctor called Cactus Bill with his fellow surgeon Duck, played by Justin Theroux. Rudd is fantastic in this and the back and forth between him and Theroux, when they’re performing surgery or, in one case, a surgically inspired interrogation, is a deliberate and continued reference, both in look and dialogue delivery, to Trapper John and Hawkeye Pierce in the original Robert Altman movie version of MASH. It seems strange to have this here but it really works well, I have to say.

The film also has wonderful music from Clint Mansell, who scored Moon for Jones. Again, like the film itself, this wonderful score could almost be a sequel to the score for Blade Runner, with a little bit of Moon thrown in for good measure at some points. I really liked this and would buy it in a heartbeat if they would just give it a CD release. It seems odd that a masterwork of a score like this (and the same composer's score for the live action Ghost In The Shell, reviewed here) has not been given a proper soundtrack release. This needs to happen soon people. It’s a crime against filmanity... as is Netflix’s decision to hold this one back from a proper cinema release but... let’s not go there again.

The film seems to have polarised audiences with a lot of critics saying that the story keeps going off in different directions and tangents. That wasn’t my experience of it at all, I have to say. If anything the plot line was too simplistic, in a way... but the story line was always in plain sight and, although we kept cutting between two of the main character’s adventures (as we do in numerous films), it seemed pretty clear what was happening and its relevance to the ongoing story. I really think that if the newspaper critics couldn’t follow a storyline which, in all honesty, doesn’t have much of a complex tale to tell then... well... we really are in trouble, aren’t we?

My one slight grumble was that the film maybe went on a little too long past what I thought was its natural ending. I really didn’t think the last 15 or so minutes added much other than a slight shot at optimism for a couple of the characters. I really didn’t need to see anything more after Leo finds out just what happened to his girlfriend and I think a certain shot of him sitting under a tree would have been a better place for an ending to come.

It’s a minor grumble though and, for my part, I’d recommend Mute as both a great film and, most definitely, something which you should catch in its native habitat, i.e. - the cinema. If you like science fiction with a lot of heart, or 1940s film noirs for that matter, then Mute is for you. Dystopian societies this well realised are a bit of a rarity in cinema and this one is so well done that its definitely worth your time. Now keeping my eye on this director as a more serious artist to have on the radar. Looking forward to seeing what he’s up to in the future.

On Dangerous Ground

Idaway

On Dangerous Ground
1951 USA
Directed by Nicholas Ray and Ida Lupino (uncredited)
RKO/Warner Brothers DVD Region 1

This is a movie I’ve been wanting to see for a long time now, mainly because I love the score by my favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of his best works. When the opening titles start, Herrmann’s frenetic musical prelude wallops you in the ear drums like a repeat offender high on acid and wanting to cave your skull in. But more on Herrmann’s scoring later.

This movie is very much the epitome of film noir, as far as I’m concerned, dealing with a gloomy and not clear cut subject and shot through with an almost perfect design sensibility which really pushes the dark and light tones to a high level of contrast and highlights the characters and their place in the plot with a less murkier edge than the manifestation of their inner world would suggest. In other words... Wow, baby! Dig the chiaroscuro in this picture!

The story follows a well intentioned, well respected but ultimately violent cop called Jim Wilson, played with amazing screen presence by Robert Ryan. His inappropriately heavy handed response to the criminal element impeding his investigations has not gone unnoticed by his fellow cops and he is getting a reputation for being harder to work with over time. To be sure, though, although there is a lot of grey tone in the character, Jim Wilson is the hero of the film... his intentions are honourable all the way through and he does seem to be following, or perhaps even starting out for all I know, a trajectory which movie cops have been tracing for many years. Perhaps the most notable example, and pertinent to this film, would be Clint Eastwood’s portrayal of Dirty Harry Callahan in a number of movies. The scene in On Dangerous Ground where Jim’s boss is remonstrating with him for his heavy handed techniques seems to me to be something which is very similar to the same kinds of scenes you’d see in those later Eastwood movies (not to mention various other famous vigilante cop movies).

After a scene where, once again, Jim goes nuts on a villain after the woman who gave him information is murdered for talking to him, he is ordered out of town into a snowy wasteland of a community to keep him out of trouble and assist in the hunting down of a suspect who has killed a man’s daughter. Before long, the victim’s father Walter (played by Ward Bond... Bert of Bert & Ernie fame in Frank Capra’s beautiful movie It’s A Wonderful Life) are thrown together and are hunting the suspect as a mis-matched team. Walter makes it no secret that he doesn’t want the big city cop around and that the shotgun he is carrying is going to be emptied unceremoniously into the killer’s stomach when he catches him. So it’s up to Jim to both try to catch the killer and also stop Walter from murdering him before he can stand trial.

After crashing a car they commandeer from a lady midway through the movie, they come across a cabin in the wilderness where they find the other main character of the movie, Mary, played by the late, great Ida Lupino. Lupino was one of the few female directors working in Hollywood, when she wasn’t in front of the camera, and she even helped out with directorial duties, uncredited, for a few days on this one when Nicholas Ray was taken ill.

The thing is, Mary is blind and, what we don’t realise at first, is that she’s also hiding the killer, her screwed up younger brother (himself only a teen). As Jim gets to know her she easily gets the measure of Jim and senses his loneliness and the film turns into a bitter-sweet romance with two very different but kindred spirits finding their way slowly to each other.

But enough of the plot... there’s some really great things happening here which lead up to... a really lousy ending. But, having now done the tiniest bit of research on the movie (see, no expense spared for my readers... oh, alright, I checked the IMDB) I now realise why I was so dissatisfied with the film’s conclusion. But I’ll get to that in a bit, too.

Okay, so first thing I noticed about the scenes in the first half of the film, which are all set in the city, is that is all seems to have an atmosphere very reminiscent of Blade Runner. I was trying to figure out why and I reckon, and this is just a guess so if I’m wrong please drop me a line in the comments section, that the external street scenes at the start of the movie were shot on a big indoor set. In fact, although it’s an RKO film, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was shot on exactly the same street sets which Warner Bros used to use for their gangster and film noir pictures... which of course were the same ones redressed and used for Ridley Scott’s epic sci-fi opus of 1982.

So that’s one thing about the atmosphere I liked.

The other thing about this is that the attitude of the cops on the beat, the low life they have to deal with and their tendency towards corruption and violence, felt to me like exactly the same kind of “vibe” I would get from reading a James Ellroy novel. The characters almost felt like they’d jumped out of the pages of something like The Big Nowhere or White Jazz. Now I know Ellroy was dealing with similar subject matter in his LA Quartet but, seriously, I wouldn’t have expected to find that kind of stylistic flourish accented in the films of this time period. Which makes me think Ellroy may be a big fan of these kinds of movies... which is really no surprise, if true, I guess. But I really enjoyed the heck out of the bleak, pessimistic heart of this movie.

Another thing which popped me right out of my seat during the first chase scene, and which is also true for a couple of other sequences in the movie, was that the director had used hand held camera for certain moments to make the action look chaotic and give it a jangled point of view appropriate to the on screen action. Now I thought this “raggedy up the shot” kind of experimentation for this specific effect had started some time around the 1980s but here it was being used in the early fifties and in monochrome. I checked the IMDB the next day and found that, indeed, this film is considered to be one of the earliest uses of this technique committed to film... so that’s kinda interesting (not counting Abel Gance, I guess?).

The shot set ups are quite stunning and, considering it’s filmed, more or less, in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, not what I would expect to see in a film like this either... with the screen split into sections at some points and, in one unforgettable moment with Ida Lupino in her home, sliced in half, mid-screen, by a giant piece of tree which is stood there so that Mary can use it to help guide her way through the house.

The performances are all pretty much fantastic, as you’d expect from a film of this era, but the ending felt rushed and unsatisfactory. I won’t spoil that ending for you but I will say that, since watching the movie, I’ve found out that the sequence where the witness is murdered was originally supposed to have been held off until the scene just before the very last little sequence of the film and, frankly, it would have made a whole lot more sense, for both of the main protagonists, if it had been left in that chronology. It would have certainly given the ending a little more credibility... at least in my book.

And then we come, as I inevitably do with movies like this, to the music.

Bernard Herrmanns score knocks it out the park... knocks it out the park so much that it flies all the way around the world and hits you round the back of the neck. At times frenetic, at times extremely slow paced and romantic, the score comes across as a more furious take on his action style scoring for a Hitchcock movie, contrasted with long stretches of the kind of romantic and tender sound you’d find in his scores for movies like The Ghost And Mrs. Muir. There are some definite bits of score he kinda, erm, reworked for later scores in this film, including two passages which would later be used in Hitchcock films... one in Vertigo and one in North By Northwest (he’d be enraged with me for saying that but... it’s all there in the music, I’m afraid).

One other little studio story for you about this movie, this time regarding the generosity of the composer.

Herrmann was so enamoured of the quality of Virginia Majewski’s performance on the Viola D’Amour that he asked she be given a separate credit in the opening titles. The studio’s excuse at refusing this request was that they told him there were no more title cards left for the timing of the credits... to which Herrmann famously replied, “Put it on my card.” And there it is now in the opening credits... “Music by Bernard Herrmann, Viola D’Amour by Virginia Majewski.” You can buy Film Score Monthly’s brilliant restoration of the score here and listen out for the bonus track of outtakes at the end, where you can hear Herrmann’s heavy Brooklyn accent in a compilation of moments of his chewing out the orchestra for screwing up the various takes.

On Dangerous Ground, a very slightly flawed but still damn near perfect film noir, in my book... with a simple story that lets the actors breathe and allows the visual design to gather you up in its atmosphere. Definitely one to watch, I would say.

Side Effects

Kill Pill

Side Effects
USA 2013
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: This review has big spoilers right from the outset. It’s the only way I felt I could say something even remotely interesting about this film and so I would urge you, if you know absolutely nothing about this movie but are considering seeing it, to go into the movie totally blind and then maybe read my review after you’ve seen it. 

So I quite like Steven Soderbergh as a director... ever since I saw Sex, Lies and Videotape when it came out at the cinema, many years ago. He also made an absolute genius movie called The Limey, which is a bit of a cinematic masterpiece and I do generally like his stuff (I reviewed his film The Girlfriend Experience starring porn legend Sash Grey here) but, just so we’re clear, I will never forgive him for trying to remake Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which is like trying to remake Casablanca or Star Wars in terms of sheer audacity. Leave the classics alone!

Anyway, I went into Side Effects knowing absolutely nothing about the movie. I think I may have seen a trailer which was quite disjointed and, I think, didn’t really make clear the kind of movie it was... and I’m glad that was the case because about half way through the movie I realised my stupid suspicions about the main female protagonist were actually right and the movie turned into something completely different to the way it was being presented.

The film is very slow paced and well designed, as you would expect from this director. He chooses to use a mixture of different shooting styles and edit them all together very cleverly into something that works and builds a mood or “vibe” which then becomes what the film is about as much as any linear plotting... much the same, in some ways, as Danny Boyle often does these days (see my review of Boyle’s latest, Trance, here) but not going for the high energy in-your-face kind of montages that Boyle does.

Starting off with what is, in fact, a crime scene... we see pools of drying blood on the floor of an apartment and then the film flashes back three months from this point. A point it catches up to about a third of the way through the movie (much earlier than I was expecting). Because the subject matter of the film focuses on a very depressed young woman who, when her husband gets out of prison for insider trading, tries to kill herself... Soderbergh manages to misdirect his audience quite skilfully with his usual modus operandi of “fly-on-the-wall” style recording of scenes into thinking that the bloody floors seen at the opening are connected to a successful suicide attempt by the young lady in question (played really well by Rooney Mara). But, as the film slowly winds on and we get to meet some of the other principle characters, like Jude law playing the young psychiatrist who takes on Rooney Mara’s character Emily as a patient, and Catherine Zeta Jones who plays her previous doctor, Victoria Siebert, we gradually find out that people we thought were minor players are actually main characters in an actual storyline (as opposed to just a series of observations on the nature of depression) and this starts to drum home as we see the person who everyone expects is the male lead, Channing Tatum as Emily’s husband, viciously stabbed by Emily while she is in a somnambulistic trance (in a sequence not quite as extreme but certainly not unlike the classic stab mayhem sequence which marks the first killing in Brian De Palma’s original version of Sisters). Although, by now, I’d begun to pick up on the trick of the way things were going to go I still heard the audience I was sitting in the cinema with on this gasp as this scene went down... so Soderbergh really played that one right, I reckon.

My suspicions were already up by now but the movie continues to play out for a while with this sequence just being another side effect of the new drugs Jude Law’s character has prescribed for Emily... but then things started to go the way I had suspected they might and the film turns into a proper thriller of a movie with a very long lineage which traces it back at least as far as 1940s American film noir and the likes of such movies as Double Indemnity and its many retreads.

Jude Law’s character, Dr. Jonathan Banks, has been made a patsy by two of the characters and as a result is ostracised by his community, loses most of his income and even loses his wife and child as more pressure is put on him. However, this is where things get interesting as the lone, obsessive figure everyone thinks he has become (which he has) fights back using the tools of his trade and starts to play off the two antagonists together, getting something a little too much more than justice and perhaps, when his final triumph comes, acting just as badly as the two villains of the piece.

I really can’t say much more about the movie in terms of plotting in case you are still reading this and are going to go see the movie... but what we have here is a brilliantly realised film which begins by approaching the material in a less direct and more observational, “untainted-by-any-emotional-or-judgemental-agenda” kind of way, and because the director makes this choice, the film really sucker punches you (even if you are, like I was, vaguely suspicious that there is more going on here than at first meets the eye) and kicks up the tension notch after notch until it gets you to the place you’re kind of, for the most part, hoping it will go. Most of the film you will probably be rooting for Jude Law’s character but he too, leaves a nasty aftertaste in the mouth at the end and ultimately this is one of those bleak noirs where you realise that, everyone to an extent, is a bad person.

Performances by the actors and actresses, as they always are in a Soderbergh movie, are excellent and this is also to be expected with such strong leads. I think I don’t speak falsely when I say that time will probably be very kind to this movie and I would expect it to be written about ad nauseum over the years and included as a key contribution on most major studies of the thriller/noir in film on most curriculums within the next ten or fifteen years. An unexpected delight and certainly worth the time of any cinephiles with a particular bent towards that kind of cinema.