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Fear X

2003, Movie, PG-13, 91 mins

Fear X: Review

FEAR X
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Written by the late Hubert Selby Jr. — whose scabrous fictions inspired films like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) and LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN (1989) — and scored by Brian Eno, this cold psychological thriller begins on a note of piercingly mundane horror and devolves into a pretentious string of visual non sequiturs. Wisconsin shopping-mall guard Harry Cain (John Turturro) is shattered when his pregnant wife, Claire (Jacqueline Ramel), is murdered in the mall's parking lot, apparently the victim of a random, motiveless crime that also claims the life of a police officer. Guilt-ridden that he, a security guard, couldn't protect his own wife, and frustrated that the official investigation quickly peters out for want of leads, Cain begins poking around on his own, endlessly reviewing the smudgy closed-circuit security tapes of the incident, in search of clues. Cain's single-minded obsession unhinges him and he becomes convinced that someone has been using the nondescript empty house across the street from his home as a surveillance post. Cain breaks in and finds nothing but a snapshot of a stranger (Deborah Kara Unger); it leads him to a small Montana town, a run-down hotel with corridors the color of blood, and an equally single-minded cop, Peter Northrup (James Remar), who's tormented by his own guilty secret. Selby's rumination that a "man obsessed is a man possessed by a demon" was written for his novel The Demon, but it applies equally to this self-consciously provocative muddle. Cain's possession gradually strips him of his job, his relationships and his sanity, plunging him into a world of sinister conspiracies and opaque but ominous connections. In the hands of a David Lynch, such teasingly incoherent material can produce films with the disturbing power of fever dreams. In the hands of PUSHER (1998) director Nicolas Winding Refn, a Danish filmmaker working in English for the first time, it's simply annoyingly opaque. He and cinematographer Larry Smith impart a profoundly unnerving desolation not only to the wide-open-spaces exteriors (Canada standing in for the American Midwest), but the interiors as well. But the film's most haunting image — Cain's living-room wall, covered with a mosaic of "suspects" gleaned from security tapes — only evokes better intellectual-puzzle films like BLOW UP (1966), THE CONVERSATION (1974) and THE PLEDGE (2001), and Turturro's clammy, lumpen Cain is a profoundly disagreeable guide down the rabbit hole of hallucinatory paranoia. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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