Rating: C
Dir: John Balazs
Star: Nicole Pastor, Jordan Fraser-Trumble, Stephen Degenaro, Jasper Bagg
Not, in any way, to be confused with the John Cena film of the same name, the freelancer here is video editor Katie (Pastor), who is struggling to make ends meet, and has been reduced to doing work for dodgy adult entertainment providers. Which, of course, causes more salubrious potential employers to look askance at her. Increasingly in need of money to fend off her sleazy landlord (Bagg), she accepts an anonymous commission to edit some raw footage. She writes it off as low-budget found footage nonsense – or as she says, “Man, I hate student films.” But the violent content in it and subsequent works becomes more disturbing, and she increasingly suspects it’s recordings of real murders.
Attempts to bring it to the attention of the authorities go nowhere, and when she refuses to accept further commissions, the mysterious customer won’t take no for an answer. Her cat is poisoned, her family threatened, and Katie’s mental health rapidly deteriorates. It’s made clear to her that the only way to escape is to find someone else who will take over the work. Her friend Kevin (Fraser-Trumble) and mentor Guy (Degenaro) are the most obvious candidates. But can she really drop them into the hell she’s in, purely in order that she can escape? And if she refuses to do so, how will the relentless and violent employer om the other end of the Internet connection react to her decision?
You certainly have to shove your disbelief to one side here: the notion that a serial killer would send his home movies off to some random to polish and add a scary soundtrack is… dubious at best. But snuff movies have been a subject of fascination for almost as long as there have been video cameras – regardless of whether or not they exist. If you can accept the premise, than a good deal of what goes on subsequently does have some kind of twisted logic. Though it’s a little odd Katie can’t bring the same level of absolute detachment which she demonstrates when editing porn. A bigger problem is a running-time simply too long for the material at 111 minutes, largely going over the same ground. Yeah, she needs money. We get it.
There’s no particular surprises in the final reel either. Or at least, the plot leaves itself with only a couple of possible ways it could reach a resolution. At least it plays out in a satisfactory manner. Pastor has to do a lot of the heavy lifting dramatically, with her character on-screen in almost every shot, and in a lot of them, by herself. Elements of Katie are also quite unsympathetic. The performance is adequate, though her horrified reaction to the footage, as on the poster, is somewhat at odds with what we see, which could well be the mediocre student short she initially suspects. Look, we run a film festival: we know what those look like…