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Surveillance review
:. Director: Jennifer Lynch
:. Starring: Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman
:. Script: Jennifer Chambers Lynch
:. Running Time: 1:38
:. Year: 2008
:. Country: USA
:. Official Site: Surveillance
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The problem with films with a twist is the writing. So that the trap set for the viewer works well, this kind of detail requires a goldsmith for the psychology of characters, the story itself and the tiniest details of the staging. When the machine is well oiled, it's a pleasure to revisit the film and look for clues that stuck a bug in our ear, as well as what elements contributed to fooling the audience.
Unfortunately, heredity is not necessarily imposed in the Lynch family. From the opening shots of Surveillance one fears the worst. An aggressive soundtrack plays as we see the rapid fire shots of a massacre perpetrated by two masked assailants as they enter a couple's home and kill them in their sleep: violence and unrest hit the viewer at the outset. Jennifer Lynch's Surveillance is touted as a film close to what dad David does best (Twin Peaks, Lost Highway) in the genre. The impression persists when you see two FBI agents arriving to interview three survivors of a massacre. These characters of David Lynch's cult series, the local police show themselves to be incompetent, inexperienced and even ridiculous. In the portrait gallery, we have the witnesses: an eight year old child in a state of shock, a junkie and a trigger-happy policeman.
After the opening scene plays the violence card, Jennifer Lynch rolls out her machine on amore traditional mode. The film is built on three stories that overlap each other and at the discretion of the truth they contain. As in Greg McLean's Wolf Creek, the massacre in question takes place out in the open, in the middle of a desert highway on which stalled motorists find themselves trapped, at the mercy of serial killers — locking victims in an open space, to better instill a sense of claustrophobia was certainly a good premise in the script.
Unfortunately, onscreen, the scenes followed each other without building any sense of suspense. And when the twist emerges, despite the joy of being surprised by the horror (thanks to a frightening Julia Ormond), one realizes that the film cannot survive its anecdotal facture.
Surveillance disappoints even more especially since it paints the portrait of two serial killers who are particularly cruel and devoid of conscience, remorse or moral, if not their own, barely when one of them decides to spare a victim under the pretext that she unmasked them. It's too bad the film forces us to endure its inanity to get to the discovery of these murderers, who deserved better treatment.
Moland Fengkov
Translated into English by Anji Milanovic
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