One day when James gets into the car, the car radio suddenly starts playing music it shouldn’t be playing. It turns out that there is a CD in the stereo that isn’t his He asks his wife Amy if she is behind the joke but she quickly declares herself innocent. After that, one after the other of inexplicable and relatively innocent events happen to James. One day when he comes home from work, however, he finds a letter in Amy’s handwriting where she says that she needs to get away and think for a while. In light of everything that has happened, James doesn’t really believe it’s true and doubts that it is really Amy who wrote the letter, no one believes him and increasingly worse things start to happen to him. He has ended up in a cat and mouse game with a psychopath who
has also placed a number of hidden cameras in the house and is monitoring every step he takes.
If I’m being really honest, I had a bit of a problem with the pace of the film from the start. It doesn’t feel like anything is happening and it never really gets going. But the tension builds up step by step in a way that makes you almost not think about it and it quickly becomes very exciting and interesting. The form of the film is a bit special, all the cameras are static and are positioned as if they were surveillance cameras. We get to see a film that is edited by the psychopath, a film seen from a subjective point of view, you could say. We simply see what the villain sees.
This means that they haven’t been able to use flashy camera moves or anything else that could distract the viewer from the story itself. It’s the action that’s in focus here, not fancy “tricks” that you can use to woo the audience. I have to say that I really like the approach! It’s not just a gimmick, as you might think, the hidden cameras definitely have something to do with the plot. It also forces the actors to perform in a completely different way and I’m especially impressed by Nick Stahl, who plays the lead role as James. He becomes more and more frustrated in his search for his wife.
The “jokes” that the perpetrator plays on him become more and more serious and in the end he is close to crossing the line – if indeed he doesn’t do it! You might be a little worried about how a project like this works realistically. I mean, we’ve all seen films based on a handheld camera that become very unrealistic when the characters refuse to let go of the camera, despite being chased by giant monsters like in Cloverfield. A single illogical angle can ruin the whole realism here, but it works all the way through. Ok, let’s be picky, there’s a scene at the very end that doesn’t feel entirely logical, I think, but that’s it!
For most of the film we don’t know what it’s really about. We are kept as ignorant as James and I can’t help but compare it to Michael Haneke’s films and Caché in particular. It’s unpleasant and the perpetrator/woman is unknown, mysterious and merciless. This is a film that is based on acting and script and I’m really getting into it!
Translation of a review I wrte in Swedish many years ago
