Co-director Adam Green has described his third film as resembling what would happen if “Alfred Hitchcock pulled Woody Allen over and fucked him in the ass”. While that image will stay with all of us for the rest of our days, upon watching SPIRAL, you can see his point and appreciate the stylistic and thematic comparisons. Vastly different to the genre hopping Green’s previous films, this is, in the director’s terms “a jazz movie” in contrast to HATCHET, a “rock n roll movie”. It’s bloodless, unshowy, slow-burning but also smart and utterly absorbing.
Like many great, influential American movies, it revolves around a social outcast, Mason, a character superbly essayed by screenwriter/co-director Joel David Moore, who was the endearingly unlikely slasher hero of HATCHET. Moore cannily makes Mason a difficult guy to like : he’s believable as a real misfit rather than a streamlined loveable Hollywood misfit. He’s gawky, inarticulate, asthmatic, unsmiling and on occasion slightly creepy. Moore’s layered performance, however, enables us to see something beyond these off-putting surface details, something sympathetic in him, just as the female lead of SPIRAL sees the same. At the point in the film where we are starting to like him, we (and she) realize that he’s really quite disturbed.
Mason works in an auto-insurance office. The only person resembling a friend that he has is boss Zachary Levi. Typical of this film’s intelligence is the way it initially presents Levi as a womanizing asshole before the actor’s three-dimensional performance allows us to see the unexpected humanity in his unwavering loyalty to his friend. Moore has unnerving “episodes” that come and go and cause him to turn to Levi in the middle of the night for reassurance and comfort. He also has a vast collection of impressive self-drawn portraits of pretty girls who presumably don’t exist.
Moore befriends new co-worker Amber Tamblyn, who lets him draw her in a variety of poses, including slightly revealing ones. Tamblyn also proves a spot-on casting choice : she’s pretty and appealing but not Hollywood pretty. She adeptly conveys a neediness and vulnerability that makes her attraction to this awkward loner surprisingly credible. The two develop an unconventional romance, but Mason’s “episodes” haven’t gone away and just who are those women?
Understated and anchored by the performances of its three main actors, this is a mature, cleverly written and pleasingly unfashionable movie. If the narrative hinges on a twist echoing recent films like THE MACHINIST, it also pays off with a deliciously dark additional sting in the tail that Hitchcock may have loved.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The ambiguity surrounding Moore’s strange character is sustained up to the bittersweet end, though his scenes with Tamblyn have an unforced intimacy and a disarming, offbeat chemistry. SPIRAL turns out to be the story of a lonely young murderer, but the movie earns increasing audience empathy for him as it unfolds : a cemetery sequence is genuinely moving, and represents the sole occasion in which Green abandons the jazz soundtrack in favor of an achingly sad pop song. Green himself has perceptively emphasized the Norman Bates parallels to this fascinating central character. As in PSYCHO and its excellent first two sequels, we don’t want this sad, oddly familiar guy to be the killer but, as the story moves on, that conclusion seems unavoidable.
SPOILERS OVER
SPIRAL is a tidy, impressive movie with no flashy camera kinetics, no flab and no on-screen violence….for the second time in two years, Adam Green and Joel Moore make a dynamic cinematic team.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
