Deadline (2009) - 2/4

I'm not sure what Deadline is trying to say or if it really earns the jarring plot twist at the end. I wonder if those who made the film even quite comprehend the implications of the end for the narrative, because it essentially leaves you at the same place as when you began the film: knowing next-to-nothing about these people.

Brittany Murphy is a troubled woman, though we only learn way in a piecemeal fashion--or do we? I can't be sure. One thing I can be sure of is that she has a friend who is on the cusp of being a lesbian lover and she's taking a week alone in a friend's Victorian country mansion to work on a script for a deadline. Once she's in the mansion, we're in Repulsion territory. She begins hearing things, her laptop seems to have been used, and she finds a set of MiniDV tapes that show a decaying marriage that might just conclude in murder.

Right there you should already be puzzled. One might expect her to find old Super8 film and see a marriage between long-dead people decaying, but no, these are Sony brand MiniDV tapes that play easily in her own camcorder. It makes her voyeurism going through the tapes objectionable: these tapes could be little more than a year old. When the possibility of murder is brought in, the film's credibility has reached breaking point: this couple disappears, but the camcorder and the tapes are just left in the house, unexamined?

Either the film is totally inept or this is all in her head. It may be a little of both. As it turns out, the script Murphy is writing is for a film called Deadline. Is everything we're seeing just what she scripted? How much actually happened in the film? The ending is one of those Tale of Two Sisters wholesale revision moments with a sinister bite, but where Tale of Two Sisters reveals more by pulling aside the illusions, Deadline leaves the viewer knowing precious little at all about these people.

Those problems with the narrative aside, the film isn't particularly frightening either, although it builds up a certain spookiness just by having a woman alone in an old house watching unsettling videos. Anyone who has watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries alone at night knows what she must be feeling then. Otherwise, it is little more than a series of Scary Soundtrack Noises and a jumpscare or two.

The film was perhaps a valiant effort and there are signs that it was aiming for something along the lines of Mulholland Dr.. The house, for instance, is lent to her by a producer. She writes a script that's titled the same as the film we're watching. There's some sort of cinema motif being built there. However, it just about all fails. You'd think someone working on this film would have said, "Wait, this doesn't seem to be thought through properly," but clearly that didn't happen.

2/4