This drama — masked as a thriller— is a debate on what is love. A random event, which results in a person's death, brings philosophy professor Joe (Daniel Craig, LAYER CAKE) to meet scruffy Jed (Rhys Ifans, NOTTING HILL).
Joe is a practical and rational thinker, who has an idea that love is just an evolutionary trick to make people procreate. He is the kind of person who rationalizes everything. Jed is irrational, believing in the intangible and creating grand cause and method out of any sign or gesture. He begins stalking Joe, believing their one shared experience has linked them.
The whole of the tragic event, including Jed's weird behavior, starts to unravel Joe as well. His stable relationship with Claire (Samantha Morton, MINORITY REPORT) becomes strained as he becomes more and more rational thus more and more emotionless. The film is quite observant when it comes to how people deal with random tragedies. I loved how the film used Joe and Jed's characters to display the extreme sides of its central premise, allowing Claire to serve as the middle ground.
The performances are good. Ifans shows great skill in playing crazy without "playing crazy," if you know what I mean. The pacing is good. So many thriller-type movies are ruined by bad pacing. To label this film as a thriller is really short changing it. It uses the thriller genre as a platform to examine deeper issues. It's a very smart film.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
