Surveillance | Thriller | rated R (L, V, S) | starring Bill Pullman, Julia Ormand, French Stewart, Cheri O’Teri, Michael Ironside | directed by Jennifer Lynch | 1:37 mins
A vacationing family and a coked-out couple traveling on an isolated road find themselves on a collision course with two psychotic cops who revel in pulling over and emotionally torturing their victims. All of these characters find themselves at the local police substation where two FBI agents (Bill Pullman & Julia Ormand) split them up and survail their interrogation as they try to try to ascertain who amongst this group may have witnessed the work of a serial killer who butchered a couple in their home the night before.
Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance, her first film since Boxing Helena over a decade ago, opens with a brief but terrifying bedroom-invasion murder. The promise that inspires carries through to a bizarre, slow and seemingly scatter-shot first act. In that act, everyone we meet seems to be randomly, senselessly, a nutcase. Pullman as a dirty FBI agent, Ironside as the obnoxious sheriff with his giggling deputies. We are dropped in the middle of the interrogation of these people as the movie shuffles between them. And it crawls. Really crawls.
And just as the movie threatens to wander itself right over a cliff and loose the audience entirely, Lynch lights a fire under it. The points come together in an extended set piece set against a desolate 2-lane highway where two car-loads suddenly find themselves at the mercy of two psychotic highway patrol officers. And from here on out, the movie belongs to the cops. French Stewart, in particular, gives a jaw-dropping performance as a cop whose instinct to humiliate and torture the prey he lords his badge over is only matched by a manic teenage enthusiasm. Nothing in his previous work has prepared us for this.
This scene becomes the movie. It’s not particularly complex or original, but Lynch plays it like a fiddle. She keeps an effective slow boil of suspense simmering throughout the sequence. Playing it slowly, deliberately, making us question how far it will go. Are we in the presence of the serial killers or has Lynch created a universe full of psychos here? Where the good guys are still better then whatever is around the corner, but they are still unhinged. It is mesmerizing and gives the movie a momentum that sustains it all the way through to the end credits.
The end. Oye. If it wasn’t so well set up and so well crafted and executed without a hint of a gimmick, I could easily be sitting here railing on the ending. It’s painfully obvious in retrospect. But Lynch is a talent, a detailed filmmaker who knows how to stretch out a scene and make it compelling and when she lets go it kicks back with a bloody snap. It shouldn’t work and it does. There is even a death in here I don’t think I’ve seen before. It’s too bad the material is ultimately not meatier. Even so, Lynch proves that she can squeeze a lot of mileage out of what is essentially a short story premise.