Neither suspenseful and self-aware enough to be a gallo film nor clever in its psychological distress of the stripe of Argento, nor as conspiracy-addled as Eyes Wide Shut (despite the material lends itself to a serious search-no Aquino, no Wexner Ohio police force, none of the threads re: Epstein's being a tapped gifted student the likes of Sarfatti; an episode of Subliminal Jihad will take you much further). Nor is the film willing to hurl itself into experimentation and formal editing proper (a Brakhage-esque experiment in conspiracy qua audio-visual editing, like a Project Wandering Soul meets Paul McCarthy, would be genuinely interesting). This is a film that loses its thread early on and lapses into clichés that do not embrace their being clichés, which means the film refuses to be self-referential. It loses the thread in a way that is similar to Jacques Rozier's Maine Ocean, but is not as smartly edited or funny. This ends up looking like the director made a poor film
not as a critical exercise with which to playfully challenge but because they simply could not make a good film. The sole saving grace is, at certain points, the lighting. A pity, because the Epstein matter lends itself to cinema. Go watch Francesco Rosi for much more accurate and affecting cinematic portrays of conspiracy. I do hope the director's subsequent film takes up the challenge of making a genuinely good film.
