BEFORE: Donald Sutherland carries over from "The Burnt Orange Heresy" - and I told you I'd get back to Susan Sarandon before long. OK, maybe I forgot to tell you that, I've been quite busy. Right now, I'm watching two movies a day on my off-days just because my schedule is so hectic, between the animation studio and the movie theater. I'd like to do something about this, because my sleeping schedule is terrible, this may be the worst it's ever been, and I think I'm going to run myself ragged if I keep this up. But I just don't see an easy way out of it right now - scratch that, I mean I DO see an easy way out of it, but I'm just not sure if it's the right move. Maybe I've taken the "easy way out" too many times in my life, I don't know. I thought getting a second job would rid me of self-doubt, but I think it's only made the overthinking worse.
THE PLOT: Detective Hazel Micallef hasn't had much to worry about in the sleepy town of Fort Dundas until a string of gruesome murders in the countryside brings her face to face with a serial killer driven by a higher calling.
AFTER: This is what my life has come to now - I'm watching a film about tracking down a serial killer, in order to relax. Thinking about this film helped me get away from my own mental loops about my current work situation, if just for a little while. But it's still a weird proposition, I think. Hey, sure, let's relax and watch a movie about some gruesome murders, sure, why not? The movie theater where I'm working is showing "A Quiet Place Part II" and the latest "Conjuring" movie, but I have zero interest in either film right now. That's another weird anomaly, I'm working at a theater and I can see movies for free if I want, but I just don't want to. When my shift ends, I just want to go home and try to relax - I'm familiar with this phenomenon, because I've worked at movie theaters twice before in my life, and I didn't usually hang around on my off days or before my shift, just to see films. It's not even a case of "Don't get high on your own supply", it's more like when you're a kid and your dad catches you smoking, so he makes you smoke the whole pack and get sick, just to teach you a lesson. Honestly, I think this is a "perk" that theaters give away for free to employees because they know they won't take advantage of it too often - I've got 300 or more movies waiting for me at home, why should I stay late AT WORK to watch one?
Once again, enough about my problems - what about the movie? The female detective here has plenty of personal problems, too, like a lingering back injury, plus an apparent relationship with a married man, one we never learn too much about, because there's just no time. Hazel's also got an elderly mother that she visits frequently, or perhaps takes care of, and she can't seem to advance within the Fort Dundas police department because of some kind of prior incident (No spoilers here...). And on top of all THAT, there's a new cop in town who just transferred in from Toronto and an older lady, a friend of her mother's that she's known for a long time, has just been found murdered in her own home.
There's no share of suspects, especially if you've seen a bunch of Hollywood films about serial killers, and are familiar with the usual "twist" options. My suspicions were raised by the town medical examiner, for example, who seemed to know just a bit too much about how the victim was killed. Yeah, that wasn't the way this went. He was a bit odd but not creepy weird. No, the film then gives us an ample number (but also the right number) of key suspects in asides, and from that the audience is able to figure things out fairly quickly, even if the Canadian police are lagging behind. Before too long, though, they're able to piece together a timeline for several murders across Canada, with a killer moving from west to east.
Here's the thing, though - Canada is big, I mean, like really HUGE. And the killer's going to cross the whole country, like that isn't difficult to do or anything? Even worse, the police can spot this pattern of murders across the country, but, like, what are the odds of that, with such a large territory to investigate? Calling every city's police department in every province just to ask them if they've seen any unusual murders lately, that seems like it might take somebody a few weeks, but the timeline here seems more like days, and that doesn't really work. Same goes for the killer's timeline - how fast is he traveling across Canada, committing murders, is he going by car, train, plane or what? And what's the span of time, because that's probably a bit relevant to how the cops spotted the pattern?
Hazel sends her new recruit from Toronto out to British Columbia to check something out, and then afterwards, asks him to stop in Montreal on the way back. Sure, that's only a few thousand miles away, right? And then once he's in Montreal, it's very convenient that he ended up so close to the exact address he needed to visit, and that information sort of came in after he arranged his travel plans, I think. So again, what are the odds?
And, hopefully without giving anything away here, once we do learn about the killer and what his motives are, it all seems just a bit off. He has very specific reasons for picking the people that he's picked, and certain things have to happen in his conversations with them that all seem a bit unlikely, and then there are other people that he DOESN'T kill, which makes things even weirder. It's a bit like the depiction in "The Eagle Has Landed" of Nazis who weren't on board with the Holocaust, in both cases we're splitting some very fine hairs to land on the exact motivations that the script demands. And then on top of all of THAT, there's that weird thing where a serial killer leaves behind a certain number of clues to his own identity because he supposedly WANTS the police to stop him - kind of like The Riddler, the Batman villain who leaves riddles behind that make it JUST hard enough for Batman to figure out what's going to happen. I think it's much more likely IRL that a serial killer would just, you know, kill people.
Also starring Susan Sarandon (last seen in "The Jesus Rolls"), Gil Bellows (last seen in "The Samaritan"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "Lucy in the Sky"), Topher Grace (last seen in "The Giant Mechanical Man"), Christopher Heyerdahl (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Kevin Parent, Katy Breier, Paulino Nunes (last seen in "Brooklyn"), Ted Whittail (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Amanda Brugel (last seen in "Kodachrome"), John Ralston (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Natalie Radford (last seen in "Superstar"), Joan Massiah (ditto), Alex Poch-Goldin (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Ella Ballentine (last seen in "The Captive"), Kristin Booth, Jane Johanson, Jane Moffat (last seen in "Enemy"), Shane Daly (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Jonathan Watton (last seen in "Breach").
RATING: 5 out of 10 coroner's reports
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