Well Done Well

Rating: Null/10 (17 November 2002)

Spoilers herein.
I've been following the trend of films about films. Horror is an especially interesting case. In quick succession, we have had `Blair Witch' in which the tape and film embodied the evil and the act of filming brought it into being. That was followed by the even more clever `Witch 2' where the realities of video and film were separate and warring for control over there mere humans. In the following year we had four slasher films which employed the making of slasher films in their plot in varying degrees of reflexive sophistication.
And now we have this which pulls out all the stops. In this version, a character supernaturally creates the video. The video plays a marvelously multipurpose role: as a film within a film, as the charm which saves the boy, as the charm which both contains and summons the spirit of the girl, and the useful device of showing it all to us.
Along the way, we have heavy use of cinematic icons: water, the ring/well, the tree, the horses, the TeeVee. There is some skillful camerawork and clever use of height in the well and the barn attic room. Naomi Watts stars in her second film of this type where a character creates what we see and what we see is blurred with `reality.'
The story is relatively simple: the intrusion of the film-within on the world of the `basic' film, starting with a fly within the video entering the world of the watcher. It all proceeds according to a pretty clear logic with Naomi entering the world of the girl (and vice versa) by steps until we see the daughter conflated with her son. The only breaking of the rules are those darned telephone calls.
But the rest is from the self-reference playbook: the husband works in the film business, the wife in the `reporter' business. The sign of impeding death in the blurred camera. The whole mystery is unraveled by finding and looking at newspapers and videos.
I saw this under the very best of circumstances: in an audience of about two hundred midteenagers at the 7:30 show. They came in groups sufficiently large to make them unruly and vocal. The swell and movement within the theater was extraordinary, which brings up a quandary fro the filmmakers. The self-reference of the story works best when this will be rented by small groups of teens for showing at home, and the larger market these days is rentals over the theatrical run.
But the effect within a theater is notable. Clearly, they have their eye on the rental market because many of the effects could have leveraged the big screen at least as well as the original, especially when contrasting between the contained video and and video taking over the screen. Oh well. This is the first really obvious compromise -- in terms of artistic decisions -- in favor of the rental market I know.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.