Pinprick

At first I thought it must be written by a woman, because of a dark, mysterious man who ends up in the midst of a mother and daughter who live alone... You don't know what to make of him. At first he's just there and no one can speak of him. There is sexual tension. Then he begins to pry deeper into their lives, more sexual tension ignites, then jealousy and then just plain strangeness. At this point the plot can have gone anywhere, but it really doesn't do anything interesting. There is a twist at the end that revealed to me nothing more than that my instinct that it was written by a woman was wrong. The writer must obviously be a man, I thought. And one who must think he's very clever, and wants to think he's in control of his characters, but really he doesn't know what to do with them and he never created a decent plot for them anyway... in the end he unravels them into a morass and leaves them that way. Some people might like this movie for it's suspense, but it just barely kept my attention and I was disappointed with the anti-climactic ending. It was made around the same time as Chloe and has a similar theme. The difference is that Chloe was written by a woman, so it's a woman rather than a man who is tasked with manipulating the other characters.

I can understand why the reviews of this film do not agree. Not everyone would like Pinprick. It is a psychological suspense film that revolves around a triangle of characters with the relationships changing as the film progresses.

Charlotte is a teenage girl whose parents have separated. She lives with her mother. A mysterious man enters their lives and complicates their already dysfunctional relationship. The fact that a teenage girl and her mother have a relationship that swings from love to hatred is nothing new, especially if the parents are estranged. But this man's agenda is unclear.

The viewer must negotiate the confusing clues of the story and try to determine exactly what is going on. There is a feeling that one character is manipulating the others, but who is the manipulator? The game is dangerous, but what exactly is the game?

To tell any more of the story would be saying too much. I will only say that this film may not have a point of view. It may be a suspense that exists only for the unraveling.

The acting is convincing. I really enjoyed the way the background music created an ambiguous mood. But the sound was annoying in a couple of scenes, making it difficult to understand dialogue.

It must be hard being the mother of a teenage girl. You have to worry about drinking and drugs, bullying from other girls, boys and pregnancy. And in the UK you also apparently have to worry about your daughter hiding a naked, older male ex-convict in her closet! The main conceit of this movie is so bizarre that from the get-go it almost immediately has to be either unadulterated exploitation (the only other film I've seen with this plot is the sleazy 70's softcore porn flick "Sister Emanuelle") or a surreal art film. This definitely starts out pretty surreal, but then it turns into a more-or-less straight drama for awhile before an ending that is even MORE surreal and ridiculous. I can't say I disliked it though simply because I've never seen anything quite like it before.

After hiding this strange man in her closet for some reason, the girl (Laura Greenwood) is perturbed when her new "friend" leaves the closet and introduces himself in another context to her divorced mother (Rachel Blake)who she is at constant loggerheads with. This leads to an affair between the ex-convict and the mother, which the daughter is not so happy about. This whole thing here sounds like some kind of mother-daughter sex fantasy, but there is never really a sexual relationship between the convict and the daughter (despite him living naked in her closet at the beginning of the movie). There is some definite sexual tension, but a surprising lack of sex.

Rachel Blake and, especially, Laura Greenwood are quite good. The actor playing the ex-con is Eastern European and not always a particularly easy to understand. Interestingly, he's the main sex object in the movie, not either of the women. There is also a fourth character--the father/ex-husband--who becomes increasingly important as the movie progresses and figures prominently in the even more bizarre ending. This is not a great movie, but it's definitely interesting.