The question “Did I really see what I thought I saw?” has been potent fuel for thrillers since well before “Blow Up.” It fuels several Hitchcock movies, of course, including “Rear Window.” But in most such thrillers, the protagonist is usually a reliable sort of person who finds themselves in a situation of having to question their senses.
In this compact and intense thriller, Simon McNally, played by Jack Quaid, has no such misgivings. He knows he saw a young woman being hustled into a van for nefarious purposes. His problem is getting anyone else to believe him. Not because he’s apt to cry wolf, but because he’s got a pretty debilitating mental illness. He doesn’t just have a voice in his head; as we see, there’s a big, irate, hairy, red man there too, and that red man is always telling him how worthless he is and how nobody likes him. (The fact that he’s spent ten years institutionalized isn’t helping him much in the big, bad world—the movie opens with a disastrous job interview.)
Fortunately for him—although it takes a while to establish how this is fortunate for anybody—Simon has a next-door neighbor affiliated with law enforcement. Ed Deerman, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, has just gotten bounced from a security gig at a local college and has little to do but be bitter about it. Oh, and to lose scads of money at online poker, ouch. When Simon first approaches him, and several times after that, Ed all but slams the front door in his face.
Once they forge a very tentative alliance and begin working together, you might expect, or rather dread, that writer Sean Farley and director Duncan Skiles are going to work some odd-couple comedy into the action. Thankfully, and wisely, they do not (at least not for the most part; Farley names two offscreen narrators “Mitch” and “Murray,” a non-sequitur hat-nod to David Mamet, but that’s the only meta misstep). Instead, they concoct a thriller that percolates old-school style, without an ounce of fat on its rope-a-dope narrative.
The movie’s depiction of mental illness is sensitive and non-condescending, although Quaid may be coming in just under the wire in terms of contemporary controversies about on-screen representation. As for Morgan, his well-worn tough-man portrayal suits him like a well-worn denim jacket. The movie’s twists eventually escalate into galvanic instances of violence, and the movie makes you shudder at every one of them. One is hard-pressed to understand why grown-up thrillers like this one don’t get bigger pushes, but if you’re a “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” type when it comes to genre, do have a look at this. It’ll very likely hit an old-school sweet (or sour) spot or two.
