This film showed up at the Chagrin (Ohio) Documentary Film Festival. It wasn't a documentary, but was programmed along with five short subject mockumentaries, with which it shared a common thread - it is about making a documentary.
What it is really about is a ne'er-do-well man-child, Duke, who has squandered what little success he achieved in the LA film world, and now extracts five-figure checks from his mother to finance the latest in a series of uncompleted projects. He assembles the necessary crew members and begins stumbling through a seemingly pointless film, opening up a five-year-old case involving a fatal traffic accident that involved a former acting colleague of his, Tyler. Duke finds a disgraced former police detective, Volek, who combines the worst of Ahab and Javert in his vendetta quest to prove that Tyler's version of the facts was a cover up (Tyler was officially cleared of wrongdoing).
Duke comes across as a self-absorbed journalist on a fishing expedition, and Volek behaves like any intrepid conspiracy theorist fighting an uphill battle against the truth. Tyler does not appear to have the necessary guile to have done any of the things Volek suspects. Having nothing better to do between film roles, he willingly participates in Duke's documentary work, which showcases the detective's paranoia and the filmmaker's own aimless impotence. These early scenes are quite funny, in a This Is Spinal Tap way.
Two women become increasingly involved; Diane, who is Duke's hapless co-producer, and Kelsey, who romantically worms her way into Tyler's life. Duke imagines slick filmed recreations of the accident. Early on, these highlight his pathetic grasping at straws trying to find substance to base his documentary upon. As the movie continues, they are repeated, getting more sinister as Kelsey begins falling in love with Tyler and Diane begins to do the detective work Duke is utterly incapable of. From this point on, I cannot reveal any more plot -- the twists to both narrative and mood come at accelerating pace.
Writer-director Peter Pardini has made an excellent black comic thriller. Almost nothing is as it seems. Most of the principals are independently employing multi level subterfuges. The above-board participants (not the ones you'd expect) realize it too late.
