Fear X DVD Review:

Audiences can only take so much mystery and suspense before a payoff is needed. It doesn’t serve a film well to never allow the audience to have a payoff for all that they have sat through. What starts off looking to be a very promising psychological thriller, Fear X ends up being more of a headache than anything else. Determined to be as subtle as possible, Fear X doesn’t seem to think it necessary for audiences to understand what the point is.

Harry’s wife was killed in a seemingly random shooting which took place in the same mall that he is a security guard, and since then Harry has dedicated his life to finding out why. He watches hours of security camera footage in hopes of finding something to give him an idea of why she was killed. Along with Harry’s wife, a cop was also killed, and the more Harry begins to investigate, he is led into a strange conspiracy of sorts. Ideas form in Harry’s head and soon he finds himself looking to the house across the street for answers.

Although it sounds exciting, most of the film we follow Harry around on his hunches, occasionally entering his mind for a strange vision, and all the time we never have an explanation for what is happening. There is little to no dialogue in each scene and it is often difficult to know what Harry is doing, regardless of how well John Turturro plays the part. There are very few elements which are actually explained in this film, and all that is said comes from a few key scenes. The rest of the film seems to be filler with long camera shots and foreboding music.

However artistic the filmmakers may have felt they were being with this long and slow suspense film, they forget to respect their audience and much of the film seems lost. All of the elements which look good within the film are destroyed when the point of the film is hidden so deep that it would take much more time and effort than a film like this merits.

The DVD has a fantastic menu, which in many ways seems better constructed than the film itself. As soon as I finished the film I was desperate to see if there was anything within the special features to explain what I had watched, but I found that all there seemed to be was a few trailers. It is disappointing that such a great menu would be wasted on a film such as this.



Ryan Izay