Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 24, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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Calling up comparisons with her celebrated father David may be too easy a jumping-off point in addressing Jennifer Lynch’s new film Surveillance, but it’s an unavoidable one—especially given that David is credited as an executive producer. But the younger Lynch comes into her own as a filmmaker with this movie, which should also dispel any lingering memories of the hostile reception that greeted her debut feature Boxing Helena over 15 years ago.
Superficially, Surveillance’s setup resembles that of Twin Peaks, with the beginning of an FBI murder investigation in a rural area teeming with odd folks. But as opposed to that eponymous lush Pacific Northwest town, this movie is set in a barren part of the Midwest (actually lensed in Saskatchewan, Canada), and whereas most of the eccentrics in David’s seminal series were viewed sympathetically, there are bad vibes stemming from almost everyone in Jennifer’s scenario. The local cops resent the intrusion of agents Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Anderson (Julia Ormond) into their case, the Bureau duo don’t have much patience for these small-town lawmen and two of the officers treat Bobbi (Pell James), the survivor of a roadside massacre and an evident junkie, more like a suspect than a victim. She’s one of three witnesses who escaped the multiple slayings and are interviewed as the film proceeds; the other two are injured cop Jack Bennet (Kent Harper, also Lynch’s Surveillance co-writer) and an 8-year-old girl named Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins).
As Hallaway watches all three interrogations from a separate room on video monitors, each survivor recounts their experiences, adding pieces to an intricate narrative puzzle in which most of those involved have something to cover up. As Lynch parcels out the revelations, it’s clear there’s more to the story than initially meets the eye, but she forestalls the viewer’s guessing ahead by keeping each scene suffused with dread and/or other elements of intrigue. The simple fact that none of Stephanie’s family members are around to join her for her interrogation casts a pall over the sequences in which we see the foursome motoring across the plains—not to mention the fact that Mom and Dad aren’t terribly attentive to their daughter. They wind up encountering Bennet and his partner Jim Conrad (French Stewart) on the road, under circumstances that render these two lawmen completely unsympathetic as well.
Add the fact that Bobbi and her boyfriend Johnny (Mac Miller) had just departed a drug deal gone sour when they became caught up in the mayhem, and beyond Stephanie, there isn’t anyone you can really like in Surveillance. As the movie goes on, it becomes clear that Lynch isn’t interested in a traditional thriller in which you’re supposed to fear a villain or villains as they threaten a protagonist or protagonists you care for, but in exploring and subverting expectations of good and evil. It thus takes a little while for the story to truly take hold, but take hold it does, as we find out more and more about the incident on that highway and how it came to have such a high mortality rate. The violence is largely psychological for the first hour, before the film explodes into startling, graphic bloodshed that gains extra punch from accompanying the latecoming revelations about what certain characters have really been up to.
Peter Wunstorf’s cinematography of the stark landscapes and the eerie sound design and score by Rob and Todd Bryanton respectively contribute to the mood of impending and arriving doom that Lynch sustains for most of the running time. There are a couple of over-the-top missteps, but on the whole this is absorbing stuff, and the director’s casting is dead-on. Pullman and Ormond bring just the right mix of dedication and disaffection to their roles, even as there’s the suggestion that they might be involved personally as well as professionally, James impresses as a bad girl who’s not necessarily that bad and it’s nice to see genre veteran Michael Ironside bring his dependable, authoritative skills to the role of the police captain. Harper wrote himself a number of juicy moments and makes the most of them as half of the bad cop/bad cop team, but it’s Stewart who’s the true eye-opener here, making a striking change of pace from his usual comic persona.
Best of all is young Simpkins, in a role that could have been either exploitative or too worldly-wise. Instead, under Lynch’s guidance, she becomes Surveillance’s de facto heroine, an innocent but observant child who takes in all manner of horrible events but possesses enough of a clarity of mind to figure out things that the adults around her cannot. In a film that’s all about how things are seen and remembered, hers become the most important set of eyes.
