Deathwatch
*1/2
Cinema
Releases - December 6, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. UK.
95 minutes. Written and directed by Michael Bassett. Starring Jamie Bell,
Hugo Speer, Matthew Rhys, Hugh O'Conor, Andy Serkis, Lawrence Fox, Dean Lennox
Kelly, Hans Matheson, Ruaidhri Conroy, Kris Marshall, Torben
Liebrecht.
"Deathwatch" is horror crossed with
a war movie, and if you suspect this might mean it consists of men running
around in mud while eerie music plays on the soundtrack, you would be correct.
This is such an accurate description of the film that I hardly need carry
on. But I'll try.
The stars include Jamie Bell ("Billy Elliot")
and Hugo Speer ("The Full Monty"), who play members of a British platoon
on the Western Front in 1917. After going over the top and finding themselves
under gas attack, the soldiers inexplicably find themselves walking around
in clean air and stumbling upon a quiet German trench whose defenders lie
dead. "What happened to the night?" asks one of the men. The answer is that
the credits sequence interrupted the nighttime warfare, and the filmmakers
cut to the daytime middle of nowhere without explanation.
Captain Jennings (Laurence Fox) orders the fellows
to secure the trench, which essentially involves wandering around, looking
at irrelevant objects and waiting for the screenplay to provide unexpected
interruptions. Strange occurrences pop up all over the place: Radio contact
is erratic, blood seems to flow from mud, one soldier is attacked by a zombified
dead body wrapped in barbed wire, and a French soldier pops up to warn that
the place itself is evil and can make people turn on each
other.
There is a lot of wandering around in the dark
accompanied by weird noises, often leaving us without a clue about which
character we're watching, where things are in relation to each other or what's
going on in general. Fine, if you're making a movie about the confusion of
combat, but "Deathwatch" is supposed to be about a small group of characters
in peril. If we can't follow the characters, there's hardly much
point.
It's not that the movie doesn't look right. There
is a muddy grime and weary sickness to the photography that unquestionably
convinces us of time, place and mood. But things are not put together properly.
When scary stuff is happening, characters start rushing about the trench
to see what's happening or take cover from potential obstacles, but the shots
do not speed up, and the tempo remains the same as in the scenes of buildup.
Same goes for the sound design: The volume remains at the same level throughout,
so when music wells up or soldiers start shouting, they almost seem to be
getting quieter.
This is also another one of those horror movies
that does its best to bide time in revealing the source of its terrors. Again,
I must ask, what's the point? Are we supposed to sit there through the movie's
hints, pretending that we don't know it's building to shock tactics? Good
horror films can be open about what's going on in their stories, because
they know that it's not scary to hide the source of evil, just
frustrating.
In fact, I'm still not exactly sure what answers
"Deathwatch" gives us. There are so many mixed messages in the film that
it could be about a haunted trench, or about evil land, or about limbo and
its final judgements. The closing scenes pose as clever but don't make a
whole lot of sense: One man is supposedly redeemed because of a single action,
but there are other characters who attempt things just as heroic and fail
to achieve them because they get shot. What gives?
The strength of the movie is that it does as least
get its look right, and tries something new with a familiar WWI setting.
While "The Trench" looked fake and felt like a stolid attempt to capture
the feelings of Wilfred Owen poems, "Deathwatch" wants to play around with
the texture of reality for the purposes of genre filmmaking. It fails, but
hey -- this is the first feature film of writer-director Michael Bassett,
and we might as well consider it a warm-up.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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