Cry of the Owl (2009) - 4/4

Once when I worked on a commune farm in my callow youth, I met a homeless man who was doing the same. He wasn't a bad guy; he seemed harmless. But both myself and an Irishman I worked with felt uneasy around him; he gave off a vibe that made us want to avoid him or, as my coworker put it, to punch him in the face. Sometimes you meet people and, while you're not sure why, they make you uneasy, give you 'the creeps'. Sometimes it's subtle things in how they speak and behave and sometimes it's a more mystical sense that this person is somehow cursed. Cry of the Owl is about such a person, Robert Forrester, a designer for an aeronautics company played by the always excellent Paddy Considine.

Forrester has just moved to a small town to get away from his wife, an awful woman he's in the process of divorcing, and to recover from a breakdown that left him on anti-depressant medication. He seems like a normal, decent guy, with one creepy exception: our first sight of him is driving to the home of a blond woman we don't yet know (Julia Stiles) and watching her doing chores in her kitchen from the surrounding woods. When he's caught, rather than call the police, the woman becomes interested in her peeping Tom. Meanwhile her boyfriend disappears and the charges are laid on Forrester.

The story comes from Patricia Highsmith, so expect a lot of plotting. I've only touched the surface. As a Highsmith story, it's also a masterful story. She has a way of being brutal with almost no violence that is unique to her. This is perhaps because she loves her destructive characters, like Ripley. But Forrester is no Ripley. Where Ripley is hyper-aware and always in charge, Forrester is always in a daze and never in charge; he reacts but never acts. He wants to peep into a happy person's life, but he doesn't want to be involved--involvement is action. This total passivity of his proves destructive for others around him, to the point that his wife calls him 'cursed.'

Considine plays the character so expertly, while I sympathized with him, there were moments when I loathed him as well. There are subtle, unnerving touches: he rarely makes eye contact with anyone, often looking down when he should be looking into faces. On the other hand, he's quite witty and certainly is a harmless person, even if socially awkward. It is perhaps his moping passivity, that self-involved depression that makes him off-putting. Except to Stiles' character, of course, who thinks he's her destiny, though she doesn't understand how.

Such are the themes of Cry of the Owl: Destiny and passivity against freedom and activity. This is director Jamie Thraves' second feature film; I haven't seen the first, but on the strength of this picture, he's a talent to watch for. He does a fantastic job in weaving these themes along with an ominous, even pace, that tears the viewer between the reality of the plotting and the atmosphere of doom developing beneath the surface in flickers of dialogue, images, and indeed, the cry of the owl.