5 gibbles outta 5

Director – Jennifer Lynch

Well, I liked Surveillance.

Here’s the problem when your daddy’s famous for making weird movies and you also end up making weird movies: Inevitably – as the saying goes – you’re gonna’ have to grind that buckshot into silver.  I’ve never understood the saying, so instead I would say that.. it sucks.  ‘Cause no matter what you do, people can’t help but look at you through a cinema filter honed by watching dad’s films.

So: David Lynch.  Weird americana guy.  Daughter made a reviled film about obsession, then waited 15 years to put forth another effort… this one dabbling in some weird americana.  And I thought it was quite amazing.  As people are ought to say something is “Hitchcockian” if it moves slowly and has a twist, people drop “Lynchian” for things that are just weird, when it’s rarely, in my opinion, an apt comparison.  If you know the relationship here, you can, for sure, see it in ‘Surveillance’ – J.Lynch has your quirky characters, your unexplained premise, long pauses, and some other elements that have popped up in D.Lynch films.  But it’s still her own vision, and strays far from the more defined themes and stylistic beats of her father’s movies.

But just what is the film about?  The wiki entry tells us some pap about the nature of surveillance and how we alter the way we act when being watched.  Sure, true.  And that’s in the story.  But I also think this is just a creepy film.  It’s not really about anything directly so much as doing what film does better than most mediums: figuring out an interesting premise, figuring out an interesting entrance point to the premise, and letting it play out on screen.  So we have our murder, shown in brief splashes at the intro, and then we have our quirky local cops and quirky FBI agents (Pullman a Ormond) and then we find out that what we thought we were talking about wasn’t what we were talking about…  But what I enjoyed most about watching the movie is that even though it’s essentially a twist film, it isn’t shot like one and doesn’t really try to fool us.  It’s almost like Lynch thought the premise was cool but then got more interested in her characters.

Which are all well-defined and well acted.  The sets are designed and creepified and lensed to a T.  And… there’s not much more to say, oddly.  Sometimes a movie is just a movie.  David Lynch can busy himself with dreams and dropping symbols into his movies, Jennifer Lynch just made a solid, unique experience with ‘Surveillance’.