Fear X Movie Review:


Synopsis:

Security guard Harry Cain (Turturro) is on a solitary mission to discover who murdered his wife, in a seemingly random sniper shooting in a shopping mall.
Harry's dark venture into the unknown takes him to the brink of madness, where he may find the answers he has been seeking.

Harry lives in snowy Wisconsin, in an apartment evocative of the 50’s. It is nondescript and lacklustre, much like his life since the death of his beloved wife.

He spends his days searching and detaining shoplifters in the local precinct, and his evenings trawling through CCTV footage of his wife's shooting provided by a colleague, desperately searching for the culprit. “Who knows what you may find out if you keep looking?” becomes his mantra.

His clue - laden nightmares are punctuated with horrifying images which seem to delve further into the mystery.

Turturro never over - plays the role, preferring a more muted, restrained approach, and his haunted appearance also serves the movie perfectly.

Fear X is an incredibly stylised movie. It is a pleasure to study each scene. The set dressing must have been painstaking, as all the elements serve a purpose and provide a symbolic gesture.
Images within the movie are diamond sharp, all the more distinctive when compared to the grainy camera footage, which is so full of answers, prompting severe neck craning due to the inevitable clue factor.

The mall videos whizz past the viewer, evoking Harry’s state of mind; nothing registers unless it will help him find out ‘why’.
Some incredibly smooth camera work follows him around the mall, speedy, fluid and impressive.

The clues are eked out suspensefully. In a technique akin to Lynch, Refn drops us little red hints – a lampshade here, a chick in a red dress there, before building up the tension until everything is claret and the tale finally yields an answer.

Fear X is a thought provoker, to be pondered upon. So many straightforward events are also shrouded in mystery, destined to be debated by many. Just in case you’re in doubt of the strange depths, note the suitably odd hotel (Lynch again?) complete with quirky check - in man. In a red shirt.

It could be argued this is a cold, frosty movie but when the frost does crack, it serves to later empower an amazing scene, a surprisingly moving and unique moment.

The key is, that in spite of its obvious Lynchian influences, it does have some original ideas and conveys them in a confident intelligent manner.

This self – consciously classy movie may not appeal to a wider audience, but it probably doesn’t want to.

A final thought – the DVD could make a fantastic feature out of the security footage and it would definitely merit a second viewing at home.

Terresa Gaffney

When the moment comes, we’re not quite ready for it. Neither are the characters. A security guard whose wife has been shot dead is looking into
the eyes of the man who shot her. His journey was not to find out who killed his wife as much as why she died; when asked if he wants to kill his
wife’s killer, he simply says ‘I’m not a murderer.’

“Fear X,” directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and written by Refn and Hubert Selby Jr., is a story about a troubled, obsessed man looking for a reason for the great injustice that has struck his life. His name is Harry (Selby Jr. likes characters called Harry, for reasons best known to himself) and he is played by John Turturro. It plays as a unique look at grief; everyone copes with loss differently, and Harry makes it his duty to track down the murderer. The police want to find the shooter too, but they seem to have
some hidden political agenda (this subplot is never fully explored, but, considering this is Harry’s story, I prefer it being left ambiguous).

He works at the shopping centre where his wife was killed. There, his co-workers give him a lot of sympathetic looks, but never really go out of
their way to make him feel better. One of his co-workers gives him videos of security footage, which he watches at home, recording faces and snippets of information about any possible suspects; faces that appear over and over,
people acting suspiciously, or anyone that, in his mind, may have killed his wife. It could be any one of these people.

There is a house across the road from Harry that grabs his attention. In the film’s opening sequence, we see his wife wander in. Did that really happen? Was it some vague memory? A vision, or a figment of Harry’s imagination? He breaks in, and finds some leads that take him to Montana, where he attempts to find a girl whom he thinks knows what is going on.

There he checks into a hotel, with a goofy desk clerk and eerie, red, red walls. In a bizarre scene, he is visited by a girl whom we presume is a
prostitute, and whom Harry resists. Her dress is also very red; it’s as if she has emerged from the very walls of the hotel. It is at this point that
I realised that this was not a film to take at face value.

The film is intriguing from its very opening. I don’t think it is merely being purposefully enigmatic; there is something going on under the surface
here. The leads from one situation to another that Harry follows sometimes seem too unlikely to fully accept, yet Harry seems determined. At the end of the film, we are left with an important passage of time unexplained. What happened while the story left the audience for that time? Does Harry know? We are given some sort of explanation by the local police that can be
looked at in at least three ways, that I can think of.

The work of Hubert Selby Jr. usually sets its characters on kamikaze courses with no other choice but to self-destruct. Here the outlook is a little more optimistic. By the end we do feel like Harry’s mission is over, and he can put a lot of it behind him. Refn is a Danish director who has only directed two other films, neither of which I have seen. He knows how to grab our attention, even if the film unfolds slowly (a fast pace would be all wrong for this material), and shows us some excellent visuals; the reds of the hotel, Harry’s dream sequences, the way the camera cuts from a dark scene to a bright, outdoor scene, accentuated by the startlingly white snow
in Montana.

John Turturro, a gifted actor, has given many good performances before (watch “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing” for proof), and this is among his best. He never really lets any big gestures or emotion out (except in that astonishing scene where he finds – or thinks he finds – his wife’s murderer), but look at the subtle touches he brings to the role. Watch, for instance, the scene where the girl in the red dress enters Harry’s hotel room, and we can see him almost – almost – give in to the
temptation, then he comes to his senses, and pulls away ever so slightly, then almost gives in again, but knows that it would be wrong.

I think the point of the film is that Harry is messed up, and he thinks he is on a mission to discover why his wife was randomly killed. The film works best on the level of a brilliant psychological thriller; I feel that a lot of this film happens in Harry’s troubled mind; that he suspects things that are presented as fact, to put us in Harry’s position. I left the cinema thinking that I was sure about some things, then I realised that the film is told from Harry’s point of view, and maybe even the scenes without him were only to confuse us more, maybe they are further complications within the delusions of Harry. Can we be positive that all of the scenes in
the film actually happen to Harry physically, or is he just finding a way to cope with the issues and troubles that inevitably follow loss, especially if
it seems unfair? Sometimes the camera seems to dive right into Harry’s mind, and we are shown physical interpretations of the images and dreams that plague him. Can we be sure that it is only these sequences that are in Harry’s mind?

****1/2 (out of 5)

Adam Whyte

This is one of those quietly gnawing thrillers that slowly gets under our skin with its oppressive atmospherics and intense performances. Harry Caine (Turturro) is a shopping mall security guard in Wisconsin, obsessed with the shooting death of his wife (Ramel in flashbacks), right in the mall's parking garage. Pouring over security tapes, talking with his colleague (McIntyre) and frustrated by inability of the police detective (Young) to find any real leads, Harry is led by suspicions and fantasies that take him to Montana to meet a mystery woman (Unger) and her decorated-cop husband (Remar). Does he have any real idea how close he is to a viper's nest of violence and corruption?

Refn films this story, which he cowrote with Selby (Requiem for a Dream), like a muted drug trip! Lurid colours and eerie noises create an unsettling ambience that keeps us off balance from the very beginning. And a terrific performance from Turturro draws us in--we see almost everything through his eyes, to the point where even we start to believe in his hallucinations. All he wants to know is why his wife died--he's not driven by a desire for revenge, or at least he doesn't think he is. All of this is crystal clear in Turturro's haunting performance.

So it seems strange that the script actually undercuts his point of view by giving us the solution to the puzzle relatively early on. And the whole thing feels rather pretentious--Refn seems overly pleased with his own cleverness, laying on the hypnotic austerity a bit thickly, staying elusive and insinuating almost to the point where the film becomes dull and lifeless beneath the carefully constructed terror. The cinematography, score and production design all draw heavily from David Lynch, but without Lynch's deeply emotional resonance. Instead of a yawning sense of desperate sadness, this film gives us a driving quest for truth. It's clever and creepy, but not quite the masterpiece Refn thinks it is.

Rich Cline

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