Two young men invade a lake house and hold its owners - a couple and their small son - hostage, for no apparent reason other than the pleasure of torturing them.
A cinematic heir, in plotline, to The Desperate Hours, and Les inconnus dans la maison, and, in style, to A Clockwork Orange. Self-referential, 4th-wall breaking asides are inserted, which are apparently accounted for by a desire to imbue the film with a degree of reflexivity. The effectivity of such devices is questionable: the history of films which end up inducing the very same violence they purport to criticize is long - let's not remember them here - the reasons for that fact being intimately linked to the ontological status of the displayed image. Even the attempts at thwarting catharsis have no less unpredictable consequences. André Bazin's critical work, I am told, dealt first with some of these matters, although, in connection with theatre, it has been debated at least as far back as Aristotle. Judged merely as a conventionally fashioned horror drama - which, despite its metafictional presumptions, it is - its derivativeness stands out like a sore thumb; still, among the films I have seen by this director (Caché; Code unconnu) - and not counting the one based on another person's literary work, the relatively superior La pianiste - this is the least infuriating one. The film possesses a certain tragicomical consistence of tone which lends it a considerable degree of watchability; as for the plot's coherence, it could have done a lot worse, never mind the self-mockery displayed regarding this particular aspect of it. An intriguing interpretation of it as a political allegory has been proposed on the Internet Movie Database Discussion Forum, for which you should click here.
Rating: 48
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