Quid Pro Quo (2008)

Quid Pro Quo is burdened with flaws, a tiny indie addressing a challenging subject with all the intelligence and moral rationality of your generic people-pleasing blockbuster. Nick Stahl's narration leaves nothing up to the imagination, filling in the ideological bubbles for the audience - and if they're taking the time to watch a film like this, I'm sure they don't need it. The script is far too shallow and unfair to even justify this movie getting made. Sexual deviance here is uniformly attacked as a sign of mental illness, and though there are sound arguments as to the sanity of someone who would willingly paralyze themselves to fulfill a fetish, Quid Pro Quo doesn't even let the innocent get away. Stahl meets the group of people who teach him of this lifestyle literally underground, in a dank basement under some anonymous building. The message the film is trying to send is clear - those with unconventional sexual views are somehow "dark."

But if you're starting to think I'm one of those crazy bastards who nitpicks the hell out of a movie trying to isolate some phantom ideology, let me assure you that the movie also sucks on other terms. Another casualty of the lousy writing, the plot is absolutely awful, telegraphed painfully far in advance. The twists are so easy as to almost be insulting. Quid Pro Quo throws around a few flashy visual tricks, but to no real effect; the aesthetics don't support any sort of tone or theme at all, and the camera work is just artsy for the hell of it. The music is really, really cheesy.

The only real reason to watch this is Vera Farmiga's interesting, technically-able performance as a woman irrevocably chained to her sexuality. She is two parts sad, three parts insane and five parts compulsively watchable. The character is not very well done, but her performance props it up just enough to sell it. Nick Stahl is serviceable but the character is even less interesting.