The Ticking Man

The Ticking Man is so startling, so effective, that it could have won my very own Prix de Paul at last year's Montreal World Film Festival.

After the screening, several viewers gathered to talk about it. All of them had found the experience overwhelming, although some of them found it hard to describe or even to understand the experience. It was that unusual.

One, for instance, said that he was shocked-he meant morally outraged-by all the violence. Even though more than a dozen people are blown away, though, this isn't really a violent movie in what has become the conventional sense in Hollywood: movies that revel in the gore resulting from explosions and car crashes; those killed in this movie simply fall down as the camera moves on with the killer to a new victim. What counts here is the pace, which is almost incredibly fast. Once the shooting began, I thought immediately of Deliverance, the classic of this `genre' in which four pals paddle down a river in the rural South and are relentlessly stalked and killed by local hillbillies.

Another viewer gave Ticking credit for cinematic tension of the kind that made Hitchcock famous but added that it's `about nothing.' Actually, it is about something. It's just not about characters or even narrative in the conventional sense. It's about the experience of primal dread. Or, to put it another way, it's about the experience of being alive in the face of mortal danger. I was stunned, but also refreshed and stimulated, as I emerged from the screening room. How often do we see movies that can do that these days?