Surveillance

Director: Jennifer Chambers Lynch
Screenwriters: Kent Harper, Jennifer Chambers Lynch
Starring: Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman (interview), Pell James, Ryan Simpkins, Michael Ironside
Running Time: 97 mins
Certificate: 18

Tense, voyeuristic and ever so slightly deranged, Surveillance is pretty much everything you'd expect from a film bearing the Lynch family name. Directed by Jennifer, her first movie in 16 years, and produced by her dad David, it's a tight, engrossing film that pulls you into an FBI investigation surrounding a series of grim killings before making an expected gearshift for the finale.

Feds Elizabeth Anderson and Sam Hallaway arrive at a small-town police station to meet three different sets of witnesses who survived a brutal attack. Setting up cameras in each interrogation room, they oversee questioning of meth-head Bobbi (James), eight-year-old Stephanie (Simpkins) and volatile cop Jack Bennett (Kent Harper). Taking cues from crime classics Rashomon and The Usual Suspects, Lynch explores each witness's perspective of the event through flashbacks to piece together the murderer's identity. It soon emerges that everyone's version of the truth is distorted and the key to solving the crime may lie with the quiet young girl.

Surveillance saunters along as a black comedy, horror and crime procedural, revealing enough of its hand to keep you interested. However it's as a thriller, when the three witnesses meet for the first time on a deserted highway road, that it gains speed. Leading a bored and isolated existence in a US backwater town, cops Jim Conrad (Stewart) and Bennett shoot out the tire of the car Stephanie and her family are in. Stopping nearby are Bobbi and boyfriend Johnny (Mac Miller). Conrad and Bennett begin to torment the passengers in both cars - their abuse of Bobbi and Stephanie's mother (Cheri Oteri) being particularly disturbing and misogynistic, pushing way beyond the 'fun' they may have initially intended. The scene reaches a savage climax when a van crashes into frame and the killer clinically picks off targets. Tension is masterfully built throughout this sequence; it's edge-of-your-seat uncomfortable and by far the best part of an altogether uneven film.

Lynch is deliberately elusive with her lead characters, resulting in an emotional detachment from the pair when their case turns dramatically darker. Pullman takes on his role with a little too much panache - he's played an off-kilter investigator before (see Zero Effect), but not one with this many tics. Hallaway is a mash-up of avuncular Jack Nicholson and Blue Velvet's insane Frank Booth. Ormond's role is less showy, yet you get a sense of her longing for motherhood, and her bond with Stephanie is a touching one.

Too sadistic and weird for the masses to gravitate towards, Surveillance ends with a predictable revelation that pulls the story into Lynchian Bonnie And Clyde territory. None of the adult characters have any redeeming qualities, yet the filmmakers have managed to create something watchable despite delving into the blackest corners of human nature. With Surveillance, Jennifer Chambers Lynch has shown that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.


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