Look

Anchor Bay Entertainment / Starz

R4 DVD

We are assured in the film that there are over 30 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. and that each person will be filmed around 200 times per day. This film shows some of the events picked up by the cameras but it also suggests that in many cases nothing will result. This begs the question – “do we need so many cameras if they are unattended or ignored?”

From the camera’s viewpoint we see a set of events ranging from harassment in the workplace to a sleazy manager fondling a shop assistant. We see child abduction, shoplifting, murder and a teacher having sex with an underage student through the eye of the ever-present camera. At first unrelated, some of these incidents become intertwined further into the story. Most are simply deadends and nothing will come of them. The only ones who seem to make use of the cameras are the Police and they can only act when a crime is committed. For the rest, they may as well not be there. From what we see in the film the cameras certainly don’t do anything to stop crime, in fact many people carry on their antisocial acts almost with contempt for surveillance.

The film was supposedly shot only on surveillance cameras, but it soon becomes obvious that this is not so as in some scenes the camera position keeps changing and often the quality is a bit high. Nevertheless it is an interesting way to show a slice of the seedy life and it does not detract from the film.

Director Adam Rivkin has given us a film that is a cross between a drama and a documentary. He raises some issues of privacy that sit quietly in the background but make us think – how much surveillance is necessary before a person’s privacy is invaded versus how much information should we have in case of emergency?

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