Weekly round-up

>> Surveillance cameras and Russian vampires

by MATTHEW HAYS

Red Road

Since before 9/11, Britain has embarked on a social and police experiment with surveillance cameras. The island now has more cameras, per capita, than anywhere else in the world. In Red Road, Andrea Arnold’s ingenious, Cannes-award-winning feature, this new mediated landscape is explored thoughtfully and insightfully. Kate Dickie plays a woman who works the surveillance beat, monitoring a wall of TV screens to keep an eye on what seems like a rather grim Scotland. Her curiosity is piqued by all sorts of things, including a man who’s taking his dog for a walk. The mutt, she explains to a co-worker, is ill, poor thing. They look on as the dog relieves itself.

But her monotonous life is broken up when she spots a man through one of the copious cameras the government operates. She soon becomes obsessed with him, though it’s initially entirely unclear why. What follows is a neat little suspense film.

Red Road has a mystery at its centre, but I loved the way it showed us the deadening, creepy effects so much technology and surveillance has got to have on our lives. Like some of Egoyan’s best work, Red Road leaves you with a sickening sense of where it is we’re all going with this—a film both repulsive and compelling.

Day Watch

Various forces from various dimensions are back at it in this, the sequel to the Russian blockbuster Night Watch. Light and darkness are squaring off (that’s good and evil for those of you who missed it), setting off a potential chain reaction in the universe’s delicate balance.

I know these films, by co-writer/director Timur Bekmambetov, have a sizable cult following and are big in their native Russia, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them. Or understand them, for that matter. Honestly, Day Watch is like a bloated, cosmic soap opera that has already hit its critical mass. I felt like I was watching home movies about a family I didn’t much know nor care to get to know. In this one, after the apocalypse we witnessed in the first film, our hero attempts to battle the dark side while locating his long-lost son.

Vampires (yes, they’re with the dark side) complicate matters, especially when said hero is framed for offing several of them. The best thing about this film is its subtitles, which—for once—are actually done thoughtfully and even with a sense of humour, matching the movie’s tone and mood. It’s just too bad the same thought didn’t go into the actual script, because Day Watch feels like a clumsy mess—a Matrix knockoff with subtitles. And even as a Matrix contender, it wanes: the special effects are way too few and far between (though there’s one good car stunt, in which a woman drives a car along the side of a skyscraper.) The good news is, by final credit roll, I knew that the trilogy was two thirds over. The bad news is, does that mean I have to sit through the sequel?

Both films open this Friday, June 15

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