A problem I have with internet-era film criticism is how much it relies on hype and hyperbole. Everything always seems to be the best movie ever made or so bad it invokes rage in the reviewer. In truth, for me anyway, most movies are pretty average. They inspire no great heights of emotion or insight, inspire no strong feelings one way or the other. For the most part, if a movie doesn’t bore or offend me somehow, I more or less like it. I’m not bowled over by style as much as I once was, in fact style, even a style I like, without anything substantive to back it up, can be more irritating than pleasing, especially if it feels like a film is hitting the notes it thinks it knows I want it to hit, for the sake of crowd pleasing, fan service or whatever.
That said, the middle of the road is not a terrible place for a film to exist. The world is full of three star movies I’d happily revisit (and often do) before more challenging and intellectually or emotionally rigorous movies that are also more rewarding. Some of my favorite movies of all time I’ve only seen once or twice, but I’ve probably watched Friday the 13th part 6 once every other year or so for at least the past 15 years. Life itself is very challenging, sometimes I prefer watching films that are less so.
I doubt I’ll add it to the regular rotation, but Nicolas Pesce’s Piercing, based on a book by Ryu “The Other” Murakami, is a film that falls really comfortably into this middle ground. It’s neither a great movie nor a terrible one, it’s good points balance out its weaker ones, and I mostly enjoyed watching it while having some issues with it.
Much of the film’s strength and weakness comes from its overabundance of style. It looks great and borrows some of its visual aesthetic, as well as most of its soundtrack, from giallo films of the 1970’s, a style that’s generally pretty pleasing and very much in vogue right now. The problem is that the style is fairly discordant with the story. Piercing isn’t a mystery but rather more of a cat and mouse thriller, with the tensions not coming from who the killer is, or what their motivations are, but whether one of the film’s two protagonists will kill the other, and which one, and when. It’s the thinnest of plots driven by the vaguest of motivations, and as a result, for all of its good looks, Piercing feels kind of empty, and perhaps even emptier because it doesn’t narratively justify the use of the giallo style- it simply isn’t that kind of movie, though perhaps the movie itself doesn’t fully realize that, or realize that much of the power of the Euro-trashy aesthetic is interwoven with narratives of the films from which it originated. As much as lushly appointed modernist interiors and the music of Goblin and Stelvio Cipriani are hallmarks of the 70s Italian horror film, so are red herrings, the odd motivations and out-of-left field plot twists.
Matters aren’t helped by the fact that giallo isn’t the only stylistic pose that Piercing adopts. There are also, perhaps even more inexplicably, exterior shots of buildings that are very clearly (intentionally clearly) paper models, as well as a long hallucination sequence, in some ways the film’s centerpiece, that feels very digital and modern, replete with a CGI sort of rat/bug creature, which is well-rendered and even kind of cool, but feels totally out of place in a film that is largely otherwise draped in plush red velvet. Perhaps if there was something in the story that tied these disparate visual threads together, they could work, but since Piercing is so plot-thin, it just feels like a filmmaker trying to doing something “cool,” whether it suits his movie or not.
Still, despite its inconsistencies, Piercing is not a bad film, or at least it’s not a boring film, and occasionally its stylistic flourishes work, such as a sequence in which the film’s protagonist, a would-be serial killer played by Christopher Abbott from It Comes at Night and Martha Marcy May Marlene, pantomimes his proposed crime to get the timing right (complete with grisly sound effects). Abbott does a good job as someone who is not evil but has evil inclinations, an everyman killer who may be in over his head, and even better is Mia Wasikowska as his would-be victim, who may be a killer, or at least capable of killing, herself. Wasikowska takes what feels like a mostly underwritten role- we know almost nothing of her character’s motivations or intentions, even after she seems to have turned the tables of Abbott, and yet she brings an unpredictable, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes sexy, sometimes frightening, sometimes charming energy to the role that mostly makes it work, or at least keep us guessing- does she want to kill Abbott? Does she want to be killed by him? Is she detached from the situation, victimized by it or in control? We never really know. (I guess she’s kind of a manic piercing dream girl, which might count as a demerit for the film)
Because I don’t have strong feelings about Piercing, it’s hard to come to much of a conclusion about it. Did I enjoy watching it? Yes, mostly. Do I recall it fondly a few days later, right now, writing about it? Yes, mostly. Does it mean anything to me? No, almost not at all. Then again, maybe it’s good not to care too much about the things that you like, or the actors, or filmmakers or anything. It’s easier not to be disappointed that way.
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