If there are awards for cutting trailers than the editor of the SURVEILLANCE trailer should win Best Polishing of a Turd award. He or she shows more understanding of filmic storytelling in a few minutes of clips than director Jennifer Lynch shows in an hour and half. She hasn't directed a film since the laughably terrible BOXING HELENA. She has actually made a less entertaining film than that disaster.
A grizzly murder starts off the film. FBI agents Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman, SPACEBALLS) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond, THE FIRST KNIGHT) arrive at the small town police station where the only survivors of the killing spree are being held. Capt. Billings (Michael Ironside, TOTAL RECALL) and his bumbling officers, Degrasso (Gill Gayle, TV's DEADWOOD) and Wright (Charlie Newmark, 1990's LORD OF THE FLIES), haven't even questioned the witnesses yet. Officer Jack Bennett (Kent Harper) is blooded and beaten and very defensive. Bobbi Prescott (Pell James, ZODIAC) is a drug addict with a lot to hide. Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins, A SINGLE MAN) is a perceptive little girl who has just lost her whole family.
Nothing makes sense about this film from the start. Harper and Lynch's script doesn't even seem to understand how humans act, especially cops. In fact, the film's hatred of cops makes Alfred Hitchcock's paranoia about police look innocent. The cops in the film fall into either idiots or sick sociopaths. I understand they're supposed to be some hicks, but they don't even do the basics of police work. Bennett and his partner Jim Conrad (French Stewart, TV's THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN) find the house of the first murders, but seem to have the rest of their day clear to shoot out tires on random cars along the highway. You know, for kicks, they like to abuse their authority and torment random motorists like one's that have small kids in the car. And why does Agent Hallaway have surveillance equipment set up in three separate rooms to watch three separate interrogations happening at the same time? How is he following all three at the same time? And why does key points in the story in one interrogation not overlap another? Oh forget it, why even argue about logic.
The characters aren't even consistent to how they're established. Bennett and Conrad are disgusting inhumans, but turn into concerned law enforcers when the psycho killers seem to be coming around. Now I don't have any objection to showing bad cops, but the film's agenda seems to make the police look like power hungry sickos or crude imbeciles. All the other characters talk about how all cops are corrupt and untrustworthy. But then Stephanie, who is bright enough to figure out signs of a murder in a moving car on the highway, has no problem confiding in the same officer who moments before groped her mom (Cheri Oteri, TV's SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE) and pinned her dad (Hugh Dillon, GINGER SNAPS BACK: THE BEGINNING) to the concrete with a gun to his head.
The pacing is an awful grind. Lynch takes a painfully long time to even get to the witnesses' stories, which is the meat. She has the witnesses narrate as we see what really happened. Of course, Bennett and Prescott are liars. And they're also the least interesting witnesses for the audience. They're despicable characters. Why not focus on the only sympathetic one, Stephanie? She's smart and sweet and extremely well balanced emotionally for a little girl who just saw her stepdad smashed by a car and her mother and brother shot dead. And of course, the film has a twist. And some might argue that it helps explain away some of the problems. But it doesn't explain away why none of the characters got a funny feeling and figured it out. None of it makes any sense at all.
Lynch is playing make believe and hopes we play along. But we need to believe that any of this is based on reality. In your premise, you can lie to your audience once and get away with it. This whole film is a lie masquerading as "real life." Case in point, Lynch uses a terrible flat shot of a wall with crime scene photos on it. Then for no logical reason, she cuts away to a distracting reverse shot from the point of view of the wall as the characters look over the photos. It's obvious the shot was done by shooting through a glass wall with the photos printed on translucent paper. The shot rips the viewer out of the moment with pointless style. Then it gets worse. The characters begin to take down the photos revealing completely that they are not printed on photo paper, but something like the plastic sheets from an overhead projector. Yep, this production is straight out of a high school AV club.
As for the actors, they have no parts to play. Pullman gives his typical squirrelly performance. While she's the best thing in the film, Ormond is totally miscast. She even shows her range in an unusual role for her. But she has a natural grace that makes you think every moment she's on the screen — why is Julia Ormond in this trash?
If Lynch is trying to comment on the abuse of power from people in trusted authority positions, she fails miserably. She wallows in their depravity. This isn't as gory as torture porn like SAW or HOSTEL, but at least those films have a semblance of story and character. Lynch focuses on her most disgusting characters and gives us no one to root for. She just wants to show us how people humiliate and torture other people. Why would we want to watch that unless it has something to say about how it affects the world or the innocent? Without that it's just a snuff film. In her version of the world, serial killers have more humanity than cops and violence has no effect on people as long as it doesn't kill them. I wish someone had killed this film before it was made so it wouldn't have affected me as it did. It pissed me off.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
