Dir: Antonio Tibaldi
Star: Ryan Phillippe, John Savage, Nastassja Kinski, Jenny Lewis

When you’re shooting with her, she becomes a bit more complicated… When she shoots, she becomes not self-conscious, but insecure and the insecurity makes her self-conscious. It’s not like she’s self-conscious when she’s acting. She’s got amazing instincts and I think she’s very good, but I think she’s extremely insecure, so she wants to know how she did at the end of the take.
— Antonio Tibaldi

There are some films which are pretty much unremittingly depressing from the beginning to the end, a downward spiral of gloom, doom and depression, where things get worse at virtually every turn. Dancer in the Dark. Requiem for a Dream. And the masterwork of “Oh god, what’s the point of living?” cinema, Grave of the Fireflies. This isn’t quite up to the level of the last-named, but certainly deserves to sit among the second tier of slash-your-wrists movies. It plays like a particularly scuzzy episode of Jerry Springer: you’d probably find a picture of the West family in the dictionary, next to the word “dysfunctional.” This is mostly due to father Ray (Savage), who came back from a stint in the Vietnam war both physically damaged and mentally disturbed. He spends his nights hanging out in the bar which he runs along with his wife, Kate (Kinski), skirting the edge of trouble – such as his involvement in the “accidental” death of a stranger who seems to be looking for Ray.

They have three children, all boys. There’s Jimmy (Phillipe), a high-school baseball star, who wants desperately to get out of the hell in which he finds himself, and has a college scholarship which would accomplish this. Except, he knows all too well that it would abandon his two younger brothers, Mikey and Mark, to the whims of their father, from which Jimmy currently does all he can to protect them. The resulting tension causes Jimmy to break up with his girlfriend, Traci (Lewis), but worse is to follow, for Jimmy tells her that Mikey and Mark aren’t actually his brothers: they are his sons, the result of an incestuous relationship with his mother. Initially, I though that was the “truth” Ray demands is revealed to Jimmy, but turns out there’s more. For not long after that revelation, Jimmy vanishes, with everyone presuming he left town. Except there’s also a new arrival in town. The stranger who died in the bar turns out to have been a private detective, working on behalf of a woman, who suffered an extremely traumatic experience of her own, 19 years previously, believes Ray responsible, and is now in town, seeking payback.

I can’t argue with the performances here, in particular Savage, who certainly lives up to his name, depicting a character who seems perpetually on the edge of lethal violence, in a way that reminded me of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. Everyone else is left tiptoeing around him on eggshells, uncertain of what might set him off, and the viewer is similarly on edge. More than once, I found myself holding my breath with a grimace on my face, genuinely concerned for his family and what he might do to them. Phillippe is also solid, which was a surprise, considering at that point in his career, he was more familiar for mindless teen fodder such as I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions (the latter isn’t bad, but still is unfit to lick the boots of the film it updates, Dangerous Liaisons). He does spend rather more time than you’d expect with his shirt off; maybe it was some kind of contractual thing.

Some aspects of the film did prove problematic, though it’s hard to discuss these without getting into spoilers – and that would be a shame, since knowing the wallop of these twists would rob the film of a significant chunk of raw power. Let’s just say, I’m left wondering how much Kate was involved in what happened. There’s an awful lot that she must have known about, yet apparently kept hidden from Jimmy, and you also have to wonder what kind of twisted mind-set made the incestuous relationship even remotely credible. There may be an element of shared trauma between mother and son involved? But the concept of her being an innocent bystander to the acts of her deranged husband doesn’t seem a perfect match for the facts which are eventually revealed. Also I’m unsure about the time period in which this is set: there seems a disconnect between the ages of the protagonists e.g. the “Vietnam vet” background of Ray, coupled with the ages of the three children and Kate being much younger than her husband.

As a character, Kate does come off as rather passive, which is a little disappointing: of the three main characters, she is probably the least memorable, and doesn’t get to demonstrate anything like the same degree of intensity. Of course, subsequent events involving her father add an entirely different spin to the appearance of Nastassja Kinski in a film about an incestuous family. Damn, there’s a dark part of me that wishes the makers of this had cast Klaus in John Savage’s role. Interestingly, while Nastassja was “our very first casting idea and choice,” according to the director, it was Nastassja who suggested Savage for the role. Of course, she’d worked with him before, on Maria’s Lovers, with their relationship there hardly any less dysfunctional. Tibaldi added, “They certainly used knowing each other and being comfortable with one another in this movie.”

Ironically, I note that on this film’s IMDb page, the “People who liked this also liked…” section, offers as its first suggestion, a documentary entitled Incest: A Family Tragedy. While hardly inappropriate, this doesn’t really seem like the sort of film which would trigger thoughts along the “Hey, let’s watch another one!” lines. Indeed, if you genuinely “liked” this – in the sense of this being your #1 choice for a Saturday night flick, rather than one which you perhaps appreciated, maybe respected and then consigned somewhere to the back of your collection – then I would probably recommend some kind of therapy.