Reviews

This is an interesting essay on obsession and paranoia, dotted with engaging little potted maths commentaries. It is firmly east-coast, drawing heavily from David Lynch (especially Eraserhead) and Scorcese, and as such is visually engaging and even mesmeric in parts.

The simple, flimsy plot (which ultimately peters out) makes it seem long for a film which doesn't even run to 90, but the thumping industrial soundtrack helps things along, and the camera's relentless pursuit of our hero in his relentless pursuit of his holy grail, leave a firm impression of the director's intentions.

It's not the greatest film in the world, but it's a good example of how a low budget and a bit of imagination can make something more memorable than a meteorite crashing into an ocean liner, sending it to an alien civilisation living at the bottom of the sea. Or summit. Go see.

The bleakest, most powerful of Kieslowski's Dekalog series opens with half the screen black, and the other half full of a cat hanged by the neck from a street railing. Children scamper off in the background, laughing. The words of the title appear over the black. Bam. We're in. And we're not allowed out of this bleak, miserable world until the end credits. We must crawl through a world where humour is exiled and bitterness and cynicism reign, with our eyes fitted with lenses hand-painted by the director, turning Warsaw into a jaded defeated landscape of dirty sepias and dishwater greys. The story is simple; a young man kills a taxi driver and is, in turn, killed by the state. Just as the title says. There is no humour, no light relief. It's awful, somehow beautiful, constantly disturbing. It's dirty and tawdry. While cinema barrages us daily with glib murders by the bucketful, Kieslowski gives us just two, and shows us killing for what it is: a bare foot emerging from a shoe & sock as a dying man writhes; blood and urine dribbling into a plastic tray under the gallows. A film which haunts.

It's under-lit and over-produced. The jokes aren't funny and the shocks don't. But, this is an example of a great pitch holding up a weak production. The characters are no more than living script-notes....let's see, megalomania....check!...nerdy genius...check!...and you don't really care about their plight. But the idea's a good one, with a great intensifying repeat - the descent to flatline. Wrapping theological ideas of responsi-bility and redemption in a sci-fi wrapper is as old as Shelly's Frankenstein, and so there's something reassuringly simple about the story. Pity Schumacher didn't play to this strength.