My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009)

Sometimes a film comes along that although it hasn't received a wide release or even a reasonable marketing campaign, it can capture your attention by the very people involved. This has prestigious director Werner Herzog; the go-to-man for troubled souls Michael Shannon; a host of talented supporting roles including the always reliable Willem Dafoe and it's executive-produced by surreal transcendentalist David Lynch. I thought it's lack of attention was maybe because the film was a stinker or maybe it was just a cult classic waiting to be discovered. Now that I know, I'd unfortunately put the film's relative obscurity in the former category.
Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon) is a strange young man living in San Diego. One day, unexpectedly, he kills his mother with a sword and locks himself away in his home, claiming to have hostages. Detectives Havenhurst (Willem Dafoe) and Vargas (Michael Pena) arrive on the scene to get to the bottom of Brad's seemingly sudden act of lunacy.
As this film opens it's apparent, early on, that it's going to go in a different direction. The use of music is eerie and the behaviour of the characters very off-key but then that's entirely expected when David Lynch's name appears on the opening credits. It even has a few of Lynch's regular cast members in Dafoe, Brad Dourif and Grace Zabriskie but the most apparent thing that separates this from Lynch's efforts is the absence of haunting composer Angelo Badalamenti. Without him, it's just not the same. There are several moments to be admired and those moments are mainly fashioned with a Lynchian wierdness but it's an ability that Herzog just can't get a handle on here. Even though Lynch is weird, he is never boring but Herzog certainly comes across this way. Despite it's intriguing atmosphere and sense of mystery, I found myself losing interest and losing it rapidly. The performances - as expected - are great and Michael Shannon adds another intense and off-beat character to his resumà (C) but the tone and poor script let down any impressive work delivered onscreen. In fact, if it wasn't for the reliable cast, I'd rate this even lower than I have. As an exploration of mental health culminating into Greek tragedy, it's ambitious but the sheer strangeness of it all just falls flat.
In the same year, Herzog released "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" which was an another exploration of one man's insanity but as impressive as that was, he doesn't achieve the same balance with this one. I always knew I was taking a chance going into this but I really didn't expect it to be as bad as it turned out to be. I held onto the fact that this it may have been misunderstood but I was, sadly, mistaken.
As the old proverb goes... 'too many cooks spoil the broth'; this might have worked better had either Lynch or, especially, Herzog had a clearer idea of what they were delivering.
On this occasion I'll be changing Werner's name to 'Herz-slog'. What he was formulating, I was receiving on a badly tuned frequency.