Dan Reed, an award winning documentary director, débuts with a thriller that will only be watched for its self proclaimed shock value and soon forgotten for the lack of this and, quite frankly, any value whatsoever.
Alice's (Gillian Anderson) and Adam's (Danny Dyer) meeting is one of a chance. After he installs an alarm system in her upper class apartment, she invites him to a dull house warming party in a countryside in the unlike role of a sex toy. Their accident is one of a chance too. Alice hits a deer and they are both forced to pull over to remove the suffering animal from the road. There, they are attacked by three men they passed by earlier on. Adam is brutally beat up and Alice's raped. After one month recovery, she manages to return to work and Adam, with one eye blind and his face scarred stays locked at her home, struggling to overcome his accident inflicted impotence. When Alice learns of her father's death she drives to the countryside again where she encounters one of the rapists. She persuades Adam to take revenge they supposedly deserve.
Reed, with a brief 76 minutes running time, skips any unnecessary expositions but unfortunately in the process, looses most of the motivation for both the characters and the audience. What's left is paper thin. Dyer is his own, low class, laddish caricature and Anderson's middle aged, sexy businesswoman is played on a hysterical autopilot. Even their unlikely affair is played out with no true interest in an inevitable contrast they create. It seems that they both serve a foolish, deus ex machina plot where Reed's main moral concern is whether the revenge is not even more dehumanizing than animalistic behaviour that provokes it. He's bend on making a statement but with no interest in the process, he jumps right to the end far to quickly and makes the whole experience unconvincing and uninteresting.
Straightheads, for the most part, plays out like a character film but the little emotional intimacy that the characters actually share, is blown away by the outbursts of violence and sex. They do little more but emphasize the growing brutalization of Adam and Alice-something so painfully obvious and insubstantial that it's difficult to find any justification for the grim tones that film hits. In its attempt on deep, structured emotional insight into the life post trauma, it seems to be too brief and relies too strongly on in-your-face violence to awake any serious afterthought.
And even despite its length, Straightheads is a drag. With 20 minutes of deleted footage available on the DVD, it looks like it wasn't really sure of its narration's rhythm. It ultimately emphasizes little of the tension and drama that first rate thriller should provide and instead it dwells on cheap, worn out psychology. The metamorphosis of Adam and Alice is foreseeable and because of that disengaging. As the film, unbearably slowly, drifts towards its conclusion, Dyer's restrained pansy regresses into a violent psycho and the film reaches its feeble ending with no constructive point. It all ends too abruptly with ambiguity that is usually reserved for films of explicit intellectual strength. But Adam's stare on the audience remains empty- a worthless gesture, a last failed stunt committed by a film of a stunning, obscure numbness.
Verdict: Straightheads seems like a challenging attempt but comes across as to scared of any serious commitment to its brutal, provocative subject. Instead it will try to shock you with relentless, gruesome images but it's all just a sombre bore. It recalls visceral, nauseating power of Straw Dogs and Irreversible but is nowhere near as engaging, original or graphic.
1.5/5
Alice's (Gillian Anderson) and Adam's (Danny Dyer) meeting is one of a chance. After he installs an alarm system in her upper class apartment, she invites him to a dull house warming party in a countryside in the unlike role of a sex toy. Their accident is one of a chance too. Alice hits a deer and they are both forced to pull over to remove the suffering animal from the road. There, they are attacked by three men they passed by earlier on. Adam is brutally beat up and Alice's raped. After one month recovery, she manages to return to work and Adam, with one eye blind and his face scarred stays locked at her home, struggling to overcome his accident inflicted impotence. When Alice learns of her father's death she drives to the countryside again where she encounters one of the rapists. She persuades Adam to take revenge they supposedly deserve.
Reed, with a brief 76 minutes running time, skips any unnecessary expositions but unfortunately in the process, looses most of the motivation for both the characters and the audience. What's left is paper thin. Dyer is his own, low class, laddish caricature and Anderson's middle aged, sexy businesswoman is played on a hysterical autopilot. Even their unlikely affair is played out with no true interest in an inevitable contrast they create. It seems that they both serve a foolish, deus ex machina plot where Reed's main moral concern is whether the revenge is not even more dehumanizing than animalistic behaviour that provokes it. He's bend on making a statement but with no interest in the process, he jumps right to the end far to quickly and makes the whole experience unconvincing and uninteresting.
Straightheads, for the most part, plays out like a character film but the little emotional intimacy that the characters actually share, is blown away by the outbursts of violence and sex. They do little more but emphasize the growing brutalization of Adam and Alice-something so painfully obvious and insubstantial that it's difficult to find any justification for the grim tones that film hits. In its attempt on deep, structured emotional insight into the life post trauma, it seems to be too brief and relies too strongly on in-your-face violence to awake any serious afterthought.
And even despite its length, Straightheads is a drag. With 20 minutes of deleted footage available on the DVD, it looks like it wasn't really sure of its narration's rhythm. It ultimately emphasizes little of the tension and drama that first rate thriller should provide and instead it dwells on cheap, worn out psychology. The metamorphosis of Adam and Alice is foreseeable and because of that disengaging. As the film, unbearably slowly, drifts towards its conclusion, Dyer's restrained pansy regresses into a violent psycho and the film reaches its feeble ending with no constructive point. It all ends too abruptly with ambiguity that is usually reserved for films of explicit intellectual strength. But Adam's stare on the audience remains empty- a worthless gesture, a last failed stunt committed by a film of a stunning, obscure numbness.
Verdict: Straightheads seems like a challenging attempt but comes across as to scared of any serious commitment to its brutal, provocative subject. Instead it will try to shock you with relentless, gruesome images but it's all just a sombre bore. It recalls visceral, nauseating power of Straw Dogs and Irreversible but is nowhere near as engaging, original or graphic.
1.5/5