Your intestine tells you that the hero of “Shattered” is about to get into hassle when he goes to a grocery store after midnight and the one different buyer is a beautiful younger girl, dripping moist from rain, who asks his recommendation on which wine to purchase, accepts his supply of a carry house when her rideshare fails to materialize, and finally ends up having intercourse with him all night time lengthy. This can be a psychosexual thriller, a kind of movie wherein bare our bodies are a prelude to a physique depend.
Certainly, just like the high-tech safety units supposedly defending the hero’s palatial mountain house, this movie from director Luis Prieto (“Kidnap”) and author David Loughery (“Cash Practice,” “Lakeview Terrace”) is a machine that guarantees to satisfy sure features. Sadly, the craftsmanship is missing. That is not a knock towards the look or sound of the film, which is appropriately shiny, or the intercourse, which is fairly boisterous for a movie made within the neo-Puritan early 21st century, or the violence, which is extra spectacularly grotesque than non-horror motion pictures have a tendency to permit. (At one level, a significant character is bathed in blood and comes out trying like Carrie after the promenade.)
However, there is no getting around the truth that a number of of the lead performances are stiff to the purpose of amateurishness (no less than till the plot will get cooking about midway by means of, and everybody will get to endure, sweat, bleed and scream). And the script manages to be an excessive amount of and never sufficient, gesturing clumsily within the course of what the critic Anne Billson calls the Preposterous Thriller, whereas on the similar time shoehorning in bits of social critique concerning the haves and have-nots that make “Shattered” come off because the film “Parasite” might have been, had been it doable to repeatedly drop a movie on its head.
“Shattered” is a twist-driven movie. However, the twists do not comply with real-world logic. Nor do they embrace the dream-world anti-logic of nice psychosexual thrillers like “Fatal Attraction,” “Body Double,” “Basic Instinct” or the late-in-the-game traditional “Gone Girl,” the varieties of images the place absurdities and outrages pile as much as the purpose the place the viewers begins guffawing with unhinged delight. Suffice to say that when you’re nonetheless within the film, it is best to try this evaluation now.
The person, Chris Decker (Cameron Monaghan of the American remake of “Shameless”) is a tech entrepreneur who not too long ago offered his firm for a lot of thousands and thousands of {dollars}. He has a spouse (Sasha Luss) and daughter (Ridley Bateman) from whom he is about to be separated by divorce. He lives within the aforementioned dream home, which appears down on the plebes on the town like the house of the tycoon in Akira Kurosawa’s much more politically cogent “Excessive and Low.” The younger girl, who calls her herself Sky (Lily Krug), lives in a residential motel run by an affable dirtbag named Ronald (John Malkovich, who offers one of many movies’ solely two memorable performances) and has a self-destructive roommate (Ash Santo’s Lisa) whom she supposedly goes house with Chris to flee.
What ensues is a narrative that seesaws between exuberant nonsense and a type of half-assed sociopolitical riff, mixing resentment of amoral techno-fascist douchebros, fascination with their show-off homes, and a barely pervy obsession with model-actress-whatever sorts who may not, factually talking, be teetering on the sting of the age of authorized consent, however, are made up and costumed to evoke a barely pubescent anime waif or Lolita. Krug and Monaghan, I am sorry to say, are horrible on this, although it is arduously responsible them solely and even partially, given the lumpiness of the script and the director’s seeming incapability of steering into the skid and producing an excellent wreck of a film, the type audiences cheer lustily despite the fact that they know it is dumb.
Quite a lot of the problems come again to the query of whether or not you are watching the sort of movie that cares about plausible psychology or one that would not care much less. It handles the misery of Sky’s roommate extra sensitively than one would possibly anticipate, but it surely additionally has the hero getting his leg damaged with a tire iron throughout and tried automobile break-in after which offers us zero indication of how that shockingly brutal crime would possibly affect the sufferer’s psyche (proper afterward, he acts as if it was a minor inconvenience).
We finally understand we’ll by no means have the ability to work out who Sky “actually is” as a result of there’s nothing in her head besides greed and evil. Kudos, sort of, for taking yet another big step into uncooked, uncut sleaze by bringing in character actor Frank Grillo (the movie’s different memorable efficiency) to play a preening, wiseass, thug-mastermind sort. Grillo’s smirky supply, New York tough-guy swagger, and retro-’50s pompadour learn as a deliberate invocation of Mickey Rourke, the crown prince of display debauchery within the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the star of Michael Cimino’s remake of the house invasion thriller “The Determined Hours,” which the ultimate third of the movie generally resembles (together with each variation of “Funny Games”).
“Shattered” is, as you would possibly be gathered, a movie history-literate work that blatantly pays homage to earlier motion pictures (the home remembers each the dangerous man’s mountain fortress in “North by Northwest” and the place that Craig Wasson house-sat in “Physique Double,” and never solely does Chris spend many of the movies in a wheelchair, the director does his personal model of the dreamy wake-up kiss between Grace Kelly and James Stewart in “Rear Window”). However, the tributes obtain little, save for reminding you of different, higher motion pictures.
The image on the prime of this evaluation, John Malkovich standing in entrance of a woodpile making a goofy face, doesn’t mirror the tone of the movie in any respect, however, he is extra attention-grabbing than something that is truly within the movie, so we put it up there as a deal with for the reader. Malkovich solely has a couple of scenes, however in each one in all them, he indulges in little verbal and bodily prospers (resembling giving a reduced flower an insinuating lick) that enliven principally dreary expertise. That it by no means occurred to anybody concerned that the movie would’ve been enormously improved by placing Malkovich’s loser-outsider character on the middle of the story fairly than on its periphery is only one extra instance of the manufacturing’s failure to capitalize on the sources at its disposal.