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Wednesday, April 06, 2005
two psychological thriller movies
hide and seek - "come out, come out wherever you are"
the stunningly gifted young actrees dakota fanning plays emily, a young girl who's having lots of problems coping with her mom's sudden death. to assist emily in her grief recovery, her father (robert de niro) decides to move emily and himself away from the hustle and bustle of manhattan to a quite, big, spooky country home in an isolated area of upstate new york.
as soon as they arrive at their new home, emily becomes more and more withdrawn. she claims that she has met a new "friend" named charlie, with whom she claims to have met in a dark cave and with whom she enjoys playing hide and seek. lots of kids have imaginary friends but charlie is not a typical 9-year-old girl's imaginary friend.
by the time he does truly evil and frightening things when he gets mad, like drowning the family cat, leaving the ugly graffiti on the bathtub walls, and shoving people out of windows, it is clear that charlie may actual be real. at first all the strange behaviours lead de niro to believe his daughter is seriously disturbed. but as it gets worse, when some of charlie's actions seem impossible for emily to have committed, de niro begins to wonder who charlie is.
is he emily's split personality? is he a ghost? is he the spooky neighbor whose daughter has just died? is he the real estate agent who sold the house? is charlie the town sheriff, who seems to have keys to their house? or.. is it something far worse..? there are plenty of things to think about in this movie. that's what i like from psychological thrillers and that's what make me their fans.
i must stop here for the sake of your enjoyment...
saw - "... he wants us to saw through our legs..."
this movie does a great job of keeping the audience in their seat and wondering what the hell is going on from its beginning to end.
it is basically about two strangers who wake up to find their ankles chained to rusty pipes on opposite sides of a public toilet that is seemingly in the middle of nowhere. in the center of the room lies another total stranger, face down in a pool of blood. in one hand is the gun he apparently blew his own brains out with, in the other is tape recorder. they have no idea how they got there or why anyone would do this to them.
the strangers introduce themselves to each other. we meet dr.lawrence, a wealthy married man with a young daughter and a desire for woman outside his marriage. we're also introduced to adam, a single-guy photographer. as they start to remember clues from the past and examine clues left in the room, dr.lawrence realize that is a psychotic serial killer known as jigsaw who has chained them up. jigsaw has been terrorizing the city by trapping people who he feels need his "help" to appreciate life. he puts the victims in extreme situations, where they must follow orders left on cassette tapes, leaving them with the dilemma to kill or be killed. failing to follow through on the order brings immediate death.
a guy who once slit his wrists in his actual life was one of his victims. he has to crawl through razor wires before the door shuts and he's sliced to death. in another case, an addict has to slice open the belly of another victim to get a key to remove a 'reverse bear trap' with timing device locked around her head.
so the psycho behind the crimes doesn't directly commit murder. he is smart. his crimes are well thought out and precisely planned and even the police cannot catch him.
back to dr.lawrence and adam, on a microcassette, the jigsaw instructs dr.lawrence to kill adam in 8 hours or his wife and daughter will die. other than microcassettes, their killer left a couple clues and two rusty handsaws that are only strong enough to cut flesh and bone, in other words: their own ankles.
i loved not being able to figure out this movie and being surprised at the end.
stelly @ 11:31 AM
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