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The goal is to locate Gothic life within fin de siècle sterility, it kicks off with imagined viscera in an antiseptic bathroom. "A total blank" (Jason Flemyng) lives in an unfinished home with a fembot (Nina Garbiras) who laments his lack of advancement: "You hear about women who fuck their way to the top. I have been fucking my way to the bottom." His boss (Peter Stormare) is the human embodiment of corporate cocaine, his best friend (Andrew Tarbet) is an accountant shaving thousands off his account, flashes of brutal vengeful fantasies show his mind at work. The solitary sympathetic presence is the honcho's wife (Leslie Hope), trapped like the protagonist in "the face business" of vapid magazines. The Kafkaesque gag is the featureless visage the doormat wakes up with one morning, the blanched deadpan with pinpricks for eyes that accumulates blood and dirt like war paint. "You took the only thing that can't be replaced. My identity." The murderous madness that passes for revolt in the yuppie void, George A. Romero's most astringent mise en scène for some of his bluntest furies. (The move from Pittsburgh to Toronto adds to the trenchant parable of anonymity.) Swan dive out the conference office, downpour of tennis balls at the company locker room, the fancy hood ornament on a car as it sinks into murky waters. "You know what? I'm getting a taste for it." American Psycho is taken into account, Teshigahara's The Face of Another is a mainstay. Makeup for vacant flesh, gory meat for the pampered poodle, a teardrop pantomimed across a plaster mold. "I've been working on my image." Romero wraps Leroux and Poe in punk for the climax, and gazes ahead to a new undead millennium. With Tom Atkins, Jonathan Higgins, Jeff Monahan, Marie V. Cruz, Beatriz Pizano, and Tamsin Kelsey.
--- Fernando F. Croce |