THE DRUGGIE COUPLE: BOBBI (PELL JAMES) AND JOHNNY (MAC MILLER)

Unfortunate lineage?

This film by Jennifer Lynch seems to be regarded by most American critics as a lousy movie, and by many as an inferior imitation of the style of her father. Indeed if it's an imitation of David Lynch it's a very poor one. It lacks his ambiguity and fantasy. It's not a surreal visual poem evoking the world of dreams through an exploration of experiences beyond the realm of the rational mind. It's a B-Horror movie conceived as a police procedural. This isn't to say it's an inferior B-Horror movie. Something about the presentation of this movie, the fact that Ms. Lynch's father produced, has infuriated critics and caused them to overreact. It's a rather good B-Horror movie, though it excels more in the area of fear and extreme discomfort -- several sequences of menace and humiliation especially have that effect on you -- rather than blood and gore, though there is that; there's a progression from psychological to physical horror. Decent cinematography and some good acting help keep up the quality.

The experience provided is an extremely nasty one. But isn't that what B-Horror strives for? Is there a distance in this genre between disgusting and delicious? Aren't the most essential characters in such a movie despicable, their behavior cheap, tacky, and subhuman? Prepare for plenty of that in Surveillance and for some nauseating revelations and gore in the finale, and you will have a lovely time. Don't expect tongue-in-cheek over-the-top homage à la Grindhouse/Tarantino. This is lacking in fun stylistic references or genre-tweaking wit. Instead it has a little more pretension than it needs, but non-stop action and an admirably spare musical score offset that.

Some wretched killers are on the loose. In a prelude we see slashers attack a sleeping couple; the woman escapes into the night. Now it's bright daytime and we're somewhere out West, at a police station. Bobbi (Pell James), pretty blond on drugs, and Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins), a preternaturally mature and articulate little girl, are being held there, witnesses of something nasty out on the highway in which Jim Conrad (French Stewart), a cop from the station, was killed and his partner Jack Bennet (Kent Harper) got a wounded hand. Two FBI agents arrive, Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond). This acting duo raises the level of of the film a notch or two because they are not B-Horror hacks but something quite a bit better (as well as, of course, David Lynch alumni). Pullman is good at oscillating from reassurance to menace, an ability that proves of value here, and this is a powerful performance. Ormond delivers too as the agent-partner who draws out the eight-year-old Stephanie. The tyke arouses sympathetic feelings in the agent, who tells Sam, "I was once a sad little girl myself." It eventually emerges that Stephanie has lost her entire family on the road. Yet she is as cool as a cucumber, the only rational being found on screen, it emerges. The cops are nasty to the agents and vice-versa. Everybody is nasty, except the detached Stephanie. The agents treat Bobbi and Jack more as suspects than as witnesses. Jack and his fellow officers are extremely hostile to Sam and Liz.

Besides being seen as zero-quality David Lynch, Surveillance has been depicted as a very bad imitation of a Rashomon tale. Again, if that's what it is, it's terrible and this does point to the movie's major structural failure. Rashomon is scarcely a relevant reference. There are no conflicting versions of a single event as in Rashomon. Pullman has cameras and monitors set up so he can watch interrogations in two rooms, of Jack, the wounded cop, and of the blond and the little girl. But the interrogations meander and reveal little. Much more importantly, they are interspersed with flashbacks to events on the road involving the two cops and the passengers of three cars. The flashbacks are what happened, or a big chunk of it, not anybody's verbal account. The more essential truth is to be clearly revealed later (a thing David Lynch, with his love of ambiguity, would be unlikely to do). But the point is, they are not conflicting Rashomon alternative versions of events, but events pertaining to the various participants as revealed by an omniscient camera.

Telling a B-Horror story within the framework of a surveilled interrogation, with a shocking revelation at the end, is original enough. But merely having that meta- element of events reconsidered and revealed is hardly original. And the faux-Rashomon effect is a cheat. The whole business of the interrogations overseen by Bill Pullman on the monitors is more of a present-time delaying tactic to make the mechanical unfolding of the earlier events seem a bit more interesting, but Lynch and her writer, Kent Harper (who also plays the wounded cop), have not made good narrative use of the interrogations. The flashbacks aren't coherently linked up with them, despite the use of differently processed film stocks to differentiate the different viewpoints.

A key element is that the two cops, Jim and Jack, are very bad cops indeed, having nasty fun with people on the highway rather than enforcing the law. And Stephanie sees something along the road, but her parents and older brother pay no attention to her when she tries to report it. Bobbi and her boyfriend Johnny (Mac Miller) are on the road not far off following a drug deal that went wrong but led to their gaining possession a supply of cocaine, of which they are generously partaking. Both they and Stephanie's family are terrorized by Jim and Jack. And then the real horror comes. But we don't find out about that till the end. One can feel a slight sympathy for the victims, but even Stephanie's parents are linked with the lowlife druggie couple by their all singing along with the same song on the radio.

Jennifer would have had an easier time of it if she'd gone into some other line of work. Surveillance isn't helped much by beginning with a police investigation of creepy events, like Twin Peaks. But Ms. L. by no means comes off as unaccomplished as a director, as a chorus of reviewers insists. On the contrary, this is all too memorable and a cut above the genre level. And again, the presence of Ormond and Pullman, as well as Michael Ironside as the police captain and the young Ryan Simkins as Stephanie, make this worth watching.

Available on HDNet VOD, the film is also in limited release in theaters. The DVD is coming shortly. The film opened earlier in Europe and is being seen much more widely there.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.