Canada
Produced by Max
Perrier & Valerie Gagnon
Directed by Max
Perrier
Peter Proffit
Pictures
Panorama
Entertainment
Suspense
Reviewer: Bob Estreich
Sam is traveling through a remote farming area
and is lost. He stops for directions at a small farm and is accidentally gashed
on the arm by a woman who has been slaughtering turkeys. She takes him into the
house to patch him up, then locks him in the bathroom. While he is in there,
there is a disturbance in the house. He escapes from the bathroom and finds the
house is trashed, the woman is missing and there is a body in the cellar. He
leaves quickly, but later while stopped for petrol he hears a noise in the
trunk of his car. The woman is hiding there and runs off screaming that he has
killed her husband and kidnapped her. It is now obvious to him that he has been
set up.
Desperate, he hits on a strange plan. He
returns to the house and cleans up the mess. The body goes into the trunk of
his car. With no evidence of foul play the police do not believe the woman.
When Sam gets home Jan, his Russian-born
ex-stripper wife finds out what has happened and decides that the woman must
have killed her husband for the insurance, and that she will need the body to
prove his death. They will get half of her money in exchange for the body. Jan
sees this as a way of getting the money she wants to get away from her
miserable, low-income life. Sam is losing control of the setup as his wife ups
the ante. He is not a killer, but that’s what he is becoming. Is he tough
enough to take it?
The woman ups the ante again and rejects
the demand, and it now becomes a battle of wills between the two women. Or so
it seems.
Sam finds his wife planting evidence in
his office desk. She has made a deal with the woman and he is being set up to
take the blame. He is just getting deeper and deeper into trouble. With the
word of the two women against him, there seems to be no way out.
It is hard to believe that this is an
independent film, although it was more than two years in the making. The
quality of the plot, acting and cinematography is truly professional. Danek
Kaus and James Chancellor have written a tight screenplay from Simon Perrier’s
original story, with many twists and turns, and brother Max Perrier’s direction
has made the most of it. The only sign of a tight budget is the mostly outdoors
scenes and the limited number of characters. One thing they got right was to
shoot the film in 35mm. The better quality Technicolor widescreen image really
shows up in the outdoor scenes.
The actors are all superb in their roles,
especially Paul Burke as Sam who spends most of the film covered in blood, and
Anastasia Bondarenko who plays the money-hungry Jan. The film has already won a
number of Film Festival awards and it is surprising that its wider distribution
has not been picked up by an international firm. Still, points to Panorama
Entertainment for making the film available.
This review will appear in Volume 2 No.3 (2009)
of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.
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