Red Hook (2009) - 2.5/4

You know, some people are just always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Red Hook tells the story of a woman who saw her sister murdered by a serial killer as a child, sees a gunfight between a thief and shopkeeper during her two days on campus, and by the end of her first week on campus will have seen many of her new friends murdered in a twisted scavenger hunt. Can you blame her for being paranoid throughout the movie? The universe has it in for her. The universe as crafted by co-writer/director Elizabeth Lucas does, at any rate.

Most of that universe is on campus and it fascinated me enough that I want to talk about it. We can underestimate the power of what cinema and television represents, but at our own peril. The visual media represent the world. Apart from worldviews, they also contain world-visions. These are descriptive in nature, but take on a normative character by virtue of selection. Selected for the screen, they are somehow important. So the visions of the world we find in cinema interests me. The campus seems to be an amalgam of '90s television's vision of a campus and reality. As an instance of the former, everybody is strangely aware of protagonist Jenny (Christina Brucato) and feels a need to comment on her behaviour. As she stares out of a glass door in a campus building, some guy asks her what her "major malfunction" is, muses that she might be agoraphobic, and his girlfriend adds that Jenny should just go out if that's what she wants to do. Why would they think she's weird? She could have just been waiting for someone. Or lost in thought. Having spent many years as an academic, I have never seen such sudden, unprovoked rudeness. There is also a scene in a study hall, or rather a study pavillion, consisting of a fifteen-or-so-desk grid. Wherever Jenny tries to sit, she's rejected, blocked, or told to go away. One preppy overachiever even tells her "That's my seat," and stares at her until she gives up. It's an odd university that has such a miniscule study hall. For that matter, most students go to the library to do their reading. It's an even odder university to have such inhospitable people. This is supposed to be in New York, but there are better-equipped campuses in the Yukon. This is less a real campus than a nightmare a nervous high school senior has about what campus will be like. It gives Jenny's day-to-day existence an expressionistic quality, where her paranoia about the universe's ability to hurt her is continually confirmed.

Then there's the residence. Here's a blast of reality: her roommate (Hollis Scarborough, all vocal-cords) has googled her before she arrives and knows about her sister's murder. I personally do not google anyone I know or will know personally without permission, but it is a reality that such invasion of privacy is now routinely performed without the slightest breach of conscience because, "It's public domain." There are a lot of things that are public that we ought not to snoop through without a request for permission. It expresses courtesy, respect for another person as self-governing and autonomous. This sets the theme for the use of technology to come. But I've gotten far off-topic. The residence is a co-ed residence, but the showers are outside the rooms and apparently also co-ed. That's hard to believe. Of course, rather than being sympathetic to Jenny, everyone considers her a 'freak.' As I say, this is less real and more nightmare. In reality, people are kinder than that.

There are only two people who do show Jenny real respect and they both have the hots for her. One is a butch-but-feminine lesbian and the other is geek-chic model Gavin (Tate Ellington). Even though the film's time frame is merely a few days, Jenny emotionally develops enough to go from saying, "I'm undatable" to dating Gavin to becoming his girlfriend and having deep conversations about their feelings. The emotional developments are implausible to say the least. For that matter, why must Jenny get a boyfriend at all? I expected more from a female writer-director. This reminds me of '90s movies like The Craft and Scream, where the strong female protagonist is still perceived as inadequate, an incomplete misfit until she gets a boyfriend. We never do see her studying or finding completion in her achievements. It's a masculine vision to perceive women as being incomplete until they get a boyfriend, to see them as needing to be attached rather than being self-sufficient. It takes Jenny a whopping three days on campus to get one. Isn't she supposed to be wounded and paranoid? Of course, it's merely a plot contrivance. The protagonist needs to be rushing to the aid of someone she cares about. And that about covers Ms. Lucas' vision of the universe, informed as it is primarily by '90s television and cinema.

In the residence there is also a residential advisor, whose excitable overenthusiasm seems like every residential advisor I've met; he's organizing a scavenger hunt and spends the first thirty minutes trying to gather as many participants as possible while the exposition goes on. Naturally the characters who sign up are the roommate, the aggressive girl from the study hall, the rude couple who reproached Jenny for staring out a window, and a few other stereotypes to whom we were serendipitously introduced during the first thirty minutes. That's quite an economical approach to exposition. The rest of the film is the slasher movie, the scavenger hunt that somehow gets usurped by a murderer.

The slasher then proceeds exactly as one would expect, except high-tech. The scavenger hunt involves finding pre-arranged spots, sending pictures via cellphone to the organizer, Tim--going by the name Red Hook--who then sends out another clue. As they progress, the clues become increasingly macabre and then they start getting murdered. It naturally takes the cynical crowd considerable time before they realize it's not a joke. Except for Jenny; but she's just paranoid, right? As I say, it proceeds by the numbers. That doesn't prevent it from being inventive in how it uses the scavenger hunt gimmick.

One might expect the capacity for the murderer to reach each victim to appear implausible, but it never does strike one that way. I think this is due primarily to Lucas and her editor Alexander Hammer. The editing at this point must take account of Jenny, each of the groups competing in the scavenger hunt and the point of view of the killer, and still keep the pace smooth. They do an excellent job of this. There isn't a great deal of suspense in the killings, so the film functions better as a grisly whodunnit than a thriller. If Agatha Christie had written a post-'80s Dario Argento film, it might resemble Red Hook. Come in with the right expectations and Red Hook is an entertaining descent into feminine paranoia.