Tag: thriller

Silent Panic (2019)

Silent Panic takes a standard thriller narrative and uses it to launch a character study of three friends’ very different reactions to the same event. The film opens with the abandonment of a woman’s body in the trunk of a car. The car belongs to Eagle (Sean Nateghi), an ex-con camping with his friends Dom (Jay Habre) and Bobby (Joseph Martinez) in Angeles National Forest. The three are having a perfectly pleasant time until they discover the body and wind up disagreeing on how to handle it. Dom and Bobby are all for going to the police, but Eagle doesn’t think that the cops will believe them that the body just showed up in their trunk. As their decisions compound the problem, the film becomes something of a case study in how the men react to the circumstances, and how their choices complicate things further.

The basic setup of Silent Panic is the sort of thing we’d expect from an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the initial events play out much as an episode would. The responses of the three men are natural – Eagle doesn’t want to be sent back to prison, the other two are disturbed by his recalcitrance and increasingly guilt-ridden themselves, especially Bobby, who struggles with a drug problem. And the film makes much of this conflict, as the three move farther from being able to reveal the presence of the body without implicating themselves. Nor can they agree on what to actually do with the body—it remains in the trunk of Eagle’s car, and is the source of the film’s best tension, as he attempts to conceal its presence from his girlfriend, Robin (Constance Brenneman).

The strength of the film lies in its ability to establish and maintain tension, something which it succeeds at much of its runtime. The choice not to go to the cops is primarily Eagle’s, and he’s at once the most interesting and least sympathetic of the three protagonists, essentially telling his friends what to do in an effort to protect himself. There’s betrayal and complication, anger and misdirected energy, and the question of how the body even got there, who it is, and why it’s in their trunk. For the most part, Silent Panic manages to maintain its tension without going overboard.

The film’s weakness, though, lies in the increasingly unbelievable choices made by its protagonists, a few plot holes that are difficult to ignore, and the occasional divergence into near-comedy that seems, in places at least, unintentional. Bobby heads off to his drug dealer when he can no longer stand the tension, resulting in an extended scene in which Jeff Dowd (touted as the real-life inspiration for the Dude in The Big Lebowski) tries to convince Bobby to go to rehab, all while puffing on a vape pen. Entertaining? Yes. But not particularly applicable to the plot at large.

More problematic are some of the characters’ reactions to the presence of the body, as when Eagle decides to go off gambling and deny the body’s existence at all. Most thrillers have some kind of plot hole, but there are a number of open questions: if the woman disappeared, do the police know? Why aren’t they mentioning her disappearance? Isn’t that body beginning to smell? And so forth. While we can get past some of the problems, others become more prevalent the more you think about them.

Silent Panic is a middling thriller, with a solid concept and mostly solid performances. Director Kyle Schadt finds some excellent points of tension to keep the viewer engaged, but the film becomes less believable as it goes on. Still, it’s a good piece of entertainment and a character-driven approach to the thriller that should be lauded for the attempt.

Silent Panic is available to stream on Tubi, Amazon, YouTube, and Google Play.

L’Assassin Habite Au 21 (The Murderer Lives At Number 21) (1942)

L’Assassin Habite Au 21 (The Murderer Lives At Number 21) (1942)

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French director Henri-Georges Clouzot rose to fame on the strength of films like The Wages of Fear and Diabolique: creepy, intense thrillers that immediately bring to mind Alfred Hitchcock rather than French art house. Clouzot’s filmography goes back a bit further, though, to his first feature film in 1942, the weird, funny, and slightly subversive L’Assassin habite au 21.

The film follows police detective Wenceslas “Wens” Vorobechik (Pierre Fresnay) and his would-be music star girlfriend Mila (Suzy Delair) as they investigate a series of murders by the serial killer known only as Monsieur Durand, who leaves his business card at the scene of every death. There’s not much to go on, but Wens gets a break when a petty criminal stumbles upon a bunch of Monsieur Durand cards in the attic of the Mimosas, a boarding house run by Madame Point (Odette Talazac) at Number 21 Avenue Junot. Leaving Mila behind, Wens takes a room at the boarding house and proceeds to investigate each of his strange fellow tenants, many of them music hall performers on hard times.

L’Assassin habite au 21 has much in common with the British films of Alfred Hitchcock, relying as much on humor and comic characterizations as it does on thriller tropes. Wens is a dashing, acerbic hero, approaching his investigation almost as though it’s an amusing adventure instead of the search for a vicious killer. His suspects include a magician who keeps accidentally making things disappear, a former soldier with a violent temper and avowed respect for the killer, a failed novelist, a toymaker who makes Monsieur Durand dolls, a valet who does bird impressions, and a vampy nurse who cares for a blind former boxer. The characterizations are all loads of fun, as each suspect evinces some grotesqueries of their own that may or may not point the way to a disturbed psyche. Wens doesn’t let anything phase him, however, not even Mila, who regularly gets herself arrested in an effort to solve the case for herself. It’s a speedy, amusing little thriller, not high on scares but with rather tongue-in-cheek humor.

One of the most interesting elements of L’Assassin habite au 21 is its production circumstances. Made in 1942 in occupied France, it was the fourth script that Clouzot wrote for the Nazi-run production company Continental films. This is remarkable, given that the film includes numerous sly jabs at Nazi mentality, from characterizing one suspect as a fascist sympathizer with deep contempt for the “lesser” forms of humanity, to actually parodying a Nazi salute near the end. Clouzot would face some criticism for his apparent collaboration with the Nazis, but his films tend to mock Nazism from the inside out.

There’s really very little to complain about in L’assassin habite au 21, except that it could have been longer by ten or fifteen minutes and thus developed our characters more. It’s just an enjoyable whodunnit and it does exactly what it intends to do.

A Woman’s Face (1941)

A Woman’s Face (1941)

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Over the course of a long career, George Cukor made any number of excellent films. While he delved into melodrama (and made some great pre-Code films like The Animal Kingdom), he was primarily known as a director of light drama and even lighter comedy like Dinner at Eight and The Philadelphia Story. A Woman’s Face is an anomaly in Cukor’s career: a noir-ish thriller with undercurrents of psycho-sexual tension, mental trauma, and physical abuse.

The film begins with witnesses coming forward at the murder trial of Anna Holm (Joan Crawford). As each character tells their version of the story, the film develops a strikingly serious and personal narrative. Following a childhood trauma that left the side of her face horribly scarred, Anna becomes a blackmailer and the leader of a criminal ring. She meets Torsten Barring (Conrad Veidt), the first man to look at her with no horror and no pity, seeing a woman as outwardly and inwardly corrupt as himself. After falling in love with him and becoming his partner in crime, Anna comes across a doctor (Melvyn Douglas) who believes that he can repair the damage done to her face. Her physical transformation begins to transform Anna’s psychology and she finds herself torn between her desire for a normal life, and her continued attraction to the criminal world.

While the film largely follows a linear narrative, despite the numerous narrators, it cannily avoids revealing too much at a time. Who it was that Anna actually killed – there are at least two candidates for murder as the film proceeds – and whether she is guilty of the crime plays second fiddle to the development of Anna’s psychological state. Her scar covers several symbolic layers: at first an apparent indication of evil, then a tragic example of violated innocence, and finally a physical manifestation of the world’s cruelty. Its removal does not really change the person that Anna is, but the way that the world treats her, as she finds the tenderness and acceptance she always craved. Yet one wonders if the scar was used more as a guard against emotional understanding and involvement, an excuse for evil rather than the cause of evil in itself.

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The cast of A Woman’s Face are a combination of 1940s character actors and stars. I’ve never been a big fan of Joan Crawford, but she plays Anna with a mixture of pathos and defiance that made me side with her even when she was doing awful things. Her anger at the world is understandable, as is her underlying desperation to simply be loved. She has a perfect counterpart in Conrad Veidt as Torsten Barring, a man for whom cruelty and sadism is an expression of love. Veidt is as terribly fascinating as a sleek jungle cat, slinking across the screen and offering one hell of an argument for the dark side. Set against him, physically and morally, is Melvyn Douglas, as earnest and likable a lead actor as you can come by. The three form a moral triangle with Anna at the apex; it’s anyone’s guess which side she’ll finally belong to.

There are missteps in A Woman’s Face, however. Several comic moments feel out of place, as though Cukor was trying to inject some lightness into a very serious script. The film is occasionally predictable – I could tell you the ending halfway through, though not necessarily the exact form it would take. Cukor seems a trifle uncertain how to handle the subject matter – the most intense example of chiaroscuro taking place during an extended conversation between Barring and Anna, as the former finally expresses his nascent madness and fascist tendencies. Barring’s implied fascism might not surprise (this is 1941, after all), but it does rather puncture some of the intense psychological sparring that the film took such pains to set up. It smacks of an attempt to bring current historical concerns into the film, but comes off feeling a bit clumsy and a little too pat.

Mild flaws aside, A Woman’s Face is a fascinating film, by turns surprising and curiously satisfying. I left the film with a sense of having seen something unique, something unexpected from a Hollywood of 1941. There are some films that have you saying that they don’t make ’em like this anymore. A Woman’s Face had me wishing that they made more of ’em.