Rating: C+
Dir: Ryan Barton-Grimley
Star: Ryan Barton-Grimley, Ari Schneider, Simone Barton-Grimley, Richard Gayler
Interestingly, this starts with a different quote from the same T.S. Eliot poem – Little Gidding – used at the start of Run Lola Run. If you squint a bit, there’s a certain similarity of theme too, both films having a protagonist racing through an urban landscape, in a race against time to save a loved one. This is rather more loosely structured, to put it mildly. Frankly, you can’t trust anything you see, because the hero here is a very unreliable narrator. He is Andy McNeary (R. Barton-Grimley), an assistant bank manager, left by wife Allie (S. Barton-Grimley) to take care of daughter Abby, while she enjoys a night out with the girls for the first time since the birth.
Andy’s mental stability is already on thin ice, due to sleep deprivation, and he has also been working on a scheme to embezzle money from the bank. This goes to one side when he discovers his child has been abducted, and a voice (Schneider) over the baby monitor tells him to obey instructions if he wants to see Abby again. And the unknown abductor is very well informed about Andy’s fraudulent activities. He demands the executive extract a quarter of a million dollars squirreled away, from multiple cash machines, and hand it over in order to get his baby back. A cop, the janitor at the bank (Gayler) and the imminent return of Allie, all pose problems towards Andy’s completion of the necessary task.
The main issue though, is his disintegrating psychological state, as he drifts from sleep to wakefulness, mostly existing in a fugue state somewhere between. This results in an inability to trust the input of his own senses, rendering Andy’s situation all the more precarious. The problem is, it renders the audience’s situation all the more precarious as well, because we can no longer trust what we are seeing. Bringing the viewer along requires a deft directorial hand and a strong lead performance. I’m not certain Ryan is able to deliver on either front, at the needed level. For example, there are points where Andy’s reactions don’t seem those of a distraught father.
I was also underwhelmed by the ending, which felt too much like an embodiment of the old phrase, “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.” The resolution offered in this is certainly subject to interpretation, and I likely enjoyed the journey more than the destination. I remember periods of sleep deprivation from my youth and this nails the uneasy sensation of things operating just beyond the corner of your vision. The baby monitor, top, becomes a near-malevolent entity, like the Duolingo owl made (plastic) flesh, and reality starts to feel like a topic for debate. If this had been able to achieve a clean finish, like The Game, I might have loved this, instead of merely liking it.
The film debuted worldwide Monday, on Digital VOD, including Apple TV and Prime Video.