(Sorry about yet another delay - my second vaccination dose packed enough of a kick to make me sleep all weekend)
Conventional wisdom has it that serial killers work up to their first murder through extensive use of fantasy. They imagine what it’s going to be like, they plan and plan and plan, linger over the details, imagine how it’s going to feel, until the day they work up the courage to make the fantasy reality. And then as often as not, the plan falls apart. Intended victims have minds of their own, not as pliant and obedient as in fantasy, and it’s a lot harder to kill someone than you imagine it will be. Bodies are hard to get rid of too. I suspect this is especially a problem for most serial killers, because so much of serial murder seems so often to be about control and dominance, and that’s a lot easier to accomplish in your own imagination, where the props in your fantasy don’t have agency and circumstances always seem to bend exactly to your needs. Reality isn’t like that at all, so all of the planning based on fantasy crumbles. Control is lost. In the words of Mike Tyson - “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Piercing is a stylish, unsettling film about best-laid plans and how they go awry. It largely lands well, though I’m not sure it quite sticks the ending.
The film opens with a man standing over a baby in a red-lit room, icepick in hand. So you know we’re in for some shit. The man is Reed, and the baby is his child. Reed does not stab the child, but you can tell it’s taking some restraint. His wife comes into the room and he hides the icepick behind his back. He’s a family man, but he wants to kill, very badly. He’s preparing to take a trip out of town that his wife thinks is for a business conference, but is in reality his opportunity to book a hotel room, hire a sex worker, and then murder her. He’s thought it all through very carefully. He packs for the trip - clothes, toiletries, rope, chloroform, his icepick, a journal detailing the steps he’ll take to the letter - and kisses his wife and child goodbye.
Once ensconced in his hotel room, he rehearses what’s going to happen - what he has planned to happen, what he has fantasized about happening - before calling the agency. The woman he’d asked for is unavailable, they tell him - would he prefer another woman who could be there right away? It’s already starting to go wrong. But he’s waited too long for this, so he agrees. Cut to Jackie, sleeping on satin sheets, awoken by a voice mail from a pimp with none of the unctuous civility of the person who talked to Reed. He’s got a job for her, and she’d better get there quick, and she should bring all of her toys. So Jackie pulls it together and heads to the hotel.
Jackie has her own ideas about how tonight is going to go.
The majority of this film is centered on Reed and Jackie, and what happens that night, and they are a study in contrasts. Reed is all control and precision, at least on the surface - he’s an architect, he’s meticulously groomed, and he rehearses how the murder is going to go extensively, walking through it step-by-step, what he’s going to say, where he’s going to stand, even down to timing how long it takes. He’s taken notes. He has it all worked out in his head. And what a place his head is - beneath all of the neatness and precision is a roiling mass of murderous impulse revealed in brief glimpses that lie somewhere between nightmare and flashback, painting the picture of someone who was born…wrong, and wants nothing more than to sate his homicidal impulses. But it’s not an especially great disguise - he can keep it in place for his wife, but he’s obviously very uncomfortable with human interaction (which makes sense, because other people are outside of his control), and almost the instant that Jackie - a living, breathing human being, not a passive object of fantasy - walks into the room, his carefully constructed scenario starts to fall apart. He didn’t expect any of this.
Jackie, on the other hand, wears her torment right on the surface - you don’t get the same insight into her that you do into Reed - she is as opaque as Reed is transparent - but there’s a strong self-destructive streak and a lot of pain visible in her face and voice and actions. She is careful and thoughtful in her environment, but she is no stranger to self-harm, and she flirts with oblivion. So there’s an undercurrent of will she/won’t she throughout the movie, shifting in implication as to what that means as the film goes on. It’d be too glib to say that Reed represents order while Jackie represents chaos…it’s more like Reed typifies an approximation of life, the mask of sanity, while Jackie is actual life in all of its messy, complicated, imperfect glory. The film doesn’t over-exposit, doesn’t tell us exactly why these two people are the way they are, not in any conclusive way. We get much more of a look at Reed’s inner world (as nightmarish as it is) than Jackie’s, but overall it just gives you enough to hint at the depths, at how bad this could go, and then plays with the tension between these two people over an economical run time. It’s not exactly a battle of wills, more a battle of desires - who wants what they want at any given moment, and how badly they want it.
So there’s a pretty strong narrative and thematic through-line, but what I think really gets this film over is the strength of its vision. It’s relentlessly non-contemporary - from the credits to the cinematography to the music, it looks and sounds like something from, say, the late 1970s, but not obtrusively so. It’s not self-consciously retro like so many grindhouse “homage” films end up being. From the wardrobe to the set decoration to the lighting and soundtrack, the lurid preoccupation with the intersection of sex, death, and style, it looks and plays like a really nice hi-def restoration of some forgotten giallo - indeed, some of the music is taken directly from other films in that genre, so it’s hardly coincidence. There’s a strong commitment to a specific aesthetic and a striking use of imagery that combines fetish gear with body horror in a way that sort of reminds me of a David Cronenberg take on
The Cell, but it’s not overplayed - the imagery tells a story about the inside of Reed’s head and then it’s gone - alongside a tug-of-war between someone who wants to kill but has lost all control of the situation, and someone who may or may not want to die, it’s hard to tell because even in the world outside of Reed’s head there are definitely moments where what’s going on may very well be a hallucination, and there are points where it’s hard to tell whether Jackie is being sincere or following some S&M script that she thinks this is all about. The result is unnerving - Reed isn’t quite sure what’s happening, when or how he lost the plot, and we aren’t really sure what’s happening either because the relationship between reality and homicidal delusion is, throughout, pretty damn shaky, and so there’s no place for anyone to get comfortable..
When Reed and Jackie meet, Reed’s plan goes right out the window within minutes. Jackie is the one in charge here, and it couldn’t be any other way - a plan is just a plan, that’s all, and Reed’s need for control is fundamentally at odds with any unpredictable variable. And realistically speaking, any other human being is an unpredictable variable. He can imagine and fantasize all he wants, but the instant it becomes real, at least some of it will be out of his control, and he loses control quickly. He didn’t account for Jackie. That mostly makes for a pretty strong movie, but the ending feels…abrupt and anticlimactic. I think it hurts it a little, after a first act that is Reed’s building anticipation, a second act that is everything failing to go the way he imagined, and a third where the masks come off. There’s a lot of back-and-forth in this film, a lot of uncertainty, and I think I expected a punctuation mark - maybe a period, maybe an exclamation point, not an ellipsis. I expected to get punched in the face, and I think the film suffers for its absence.
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