Girl at the Window
One part teen soap opera, other part gruesome body horror schlock. Who is the audience for this, exactly? Probably teenagers making out in the cinema without paying attention to the film.
Teenage girl goes birdwatching with her dad, he falls into a hole and dies. She’s quite traumatised, but her mom is recovering well, dating their neighbour, a blue collar worker. Of course the girl thinks he’s the killer.
She stalks him, tries to look around his shed, but the cops brush it off as some traumatised girl having a bad dream. Her mom gives her sleeping pills, she’s clearly psychotic. But our girl is persistent, even after seeing his house is clean, she pushes forward with the character assassination.
The girl snoops around more after her friend disappears, and locks herself in his van. At this point, I was almost sure the mom was the killer, since everyone else was revealed to not be. She talks her friend and her boyfriend into snooping around, but the killer kills the boy and kidnaps the girl. She’s still in the van.
Coincidentally, the kindly neighbour finds the tunnel beneath his house where the bodies are hidden and runs to the shed for a crowbar to rescue the trapped girl. He finds the protagonist trapped in his van, and as the cops surround the property, he rushes out brandishing a crowbar and the girl by one arm, babbling something. He gets shot in the fucking heart, and pinned as the killer.
Since this is a soap opera, the killer is revealed at this time, ruining the film from this point. It’s actually the only other character, the teacher. During the final confrontation he reveals his true motive: evil people do evil things. Way to go!
This is truly weird, the tonal shifts are incredibly jarring, I don’t understand who though mixing this was a good idea. Bringing in Radha Mitchell was ingenious, she has jackshit to do but tricked me into watching this, hoping for some Riddick level badassery.
The truly final line is a joke, literally taking the edge of the entire drama they just went through. Another incredibly low cosmopolitrometer level.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.