Taylor is having another big fight with his girlfriend Jenny; storming out, he remembers the drunken advice of a friend, collects a hammer from his truck and goes back inside to brutally murder her. The moment is easy, however covering up the crime is another thing – only made more difficult by Taylor struggling to keep a hold on reality.
Tell manages to be both obvious but yet very effective at the same time. I see that the reception to the film is very mixed because people generally see it one way or the other but for me it manages to do both pretty well. As a horror of sorts it is all about the tension and build, although there are scenes of violence, really the whole film is about the tension. It does this very well and often I was on the edge of my seat, but at the same time my brain did not let go to the point where I was blind to what the film was doing. See the problem with it is that it is really using every trick in the book – and yes it is using them to get good results, but they still feel like tricks.
So the half-seen figures, the blurring or reality/imagined, the camera staring in one direction waiting for something that may or may not come and, of course, that building noise of a score. This latter one is the key thing and it really does help raise the tension. Credit to Ryan Connolly, he knows the genre and he knows what works, using everything to build a simple but very effective film. The cast support him well in this, particularly Bruno, who is a physical manifestation of the tension in the film – he balls it up and sells it. Likewise Eva, although dispatched early on, she remains a creepy presence throughout.
The film is very much about genre clichés and familiar old tricks, so I do understand the reservations about it, but at the same time it uses them all together very well to make an effective, gripping and tense 30 minutes. Well worth a look for what it does well.
