Surveillance (2008)
Average Rating: 5.2/10
Reviews Counted: 72
Fresh: 39 | Rotten: 33
This dark psycho-thriller from Jennifer Lynch, is violent, sharp and baffling, but not to everyone's taste.
Average Rating: 4.8/10
Critic Reviews: 17
Fresh: 7 | Rotten: 10
This dark psycho-thriller from Jennifer Lynch, is violent, sharp and baffling, but not to everyone's taste.
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Average Rating: 3/5
User Ratings: 31,594
My Rating
Movie Info
An FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer attempts to capture the madman with a little assistance from his would-be victims in director Jennifer Chambers Lynch's supernatural police thriller. FBI agents Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) and Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) are on the trail of some killers when they arrive in a small desert town to investigate a vicious mass shooting on the highway. The witnesses are an overzealous cop, an unreliable junkie, and an eight-year-old girl. For some
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Cast
-
Bill Pullman
Sam Hallaway -
Julia Ormond
Elizabeth Anderson -
Pell James
Bobbi Prescott -
Ryan Simpkins
Stephanie -
Cheri Oteri
Mom -
French Stewart
Officer Jim Conrad -
Kent Harper
Officer Jack Bennett -
Michael Ironside
Captain Billings -
Charlie Newmark
Officer Wright -
Mac Miller
Johnny -
Anita Smith
Tina -
Josh Strait
Keith -
Kent Wolkowski
David -
David Gane
Grocery Man -
Gill Gayle
Officer Degrasso -
Hugh Dillon
Dad (Steven) -
Caroline Aaron
Janet -
Jennifer Miles
TV Reporter -
Gerald Layton Young
Coroner -
D.R. Haney
Drug Dealer -
Angela Lamarsh
Maid -
Shannon Jardine
Elaine Meyer
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Surveillance Trailer & Photos
All Critics (72) | Top Critics (17) | Fresh (40) | Rotten (35) | DVD (4)
Pullman's striking performance here is undermined by Lynch's overreliance on those same grisly shock tactics, as well as a script that fails to capitalize on a promising premise and then swiftly collapses upon the revelation of a not-so-shocking twist.
Top CriticThe film's a failure.
In this long-time-coming sophomore film, Lynch exercises powers of her own. She gets repellant, seductive, sympathetic performances from her actors. Ormond and Pullman are frightfully good at teasing intimacy.
Its mad killers may wear masks. But the real and cheap disguise here is the film's own -- an exploitation shocker trying to pass itself off as art.
The most enjoyable way to watch Surveillance -- 'enjoyable' in the relative sense -- is to take its awfulness for granted and pay attention to everything Bill Pullman does.
A grubby, disturbing serial-killer mystery, a kind of blood-simple Rashomon.
This strange thriller mixes a penchant for grittiness with the surreal and very very dark stylings of David Lynch, who happens to be the father of the director...
The characters do not stand out, the drama is not compelling, and the screenplay is light on even remotely interesting dialogue.
Surveillance is a reprehensible film, an exercise in being nasty for the sake of being nasty, but with no style or clear sense of purpose.
It is staggering to think that a film could be so horrifically nihilistic and so painfully boring at the same time, but Lynch has done it.
[Blu-Ray Review] Surveillance is a well crafted film that will keep you rapt to the very end.
[S]low-boil sinister, delivering the kind of simmering menace that few films can bother to take the time for these days...
The pacing is so slow, you just want to yell out at the screen, "get on with it."
Jennifer is no David Lynch and her film, while inventive and quirky and at time quite devious, misses the organic alchemy of his films.
Some will be unable to appreciate the movie's savagery on any level. Others will find it affecting and uncompromising, the kind of movie that plunges you into a nightmare and ratchets up the intensity until you're grateful for a moment's respite.
A festival of carnage that's sometimes funny and sometimes waaay over the line.
Surveillance is a respectable murder mystery until its contrived 'big reveal' causes it to deflate faster than an inner tube that was just sat on by a morbidly obese person.
There are a couple of admittedly arresting images on display here and there--not enough to make this film worth watching but enough to make you hope that it doesn't take Lynch another 16 years to make another one.
Surveillance suggests 'Jennifer Lynchian' should be used for films that aspire to David's moody, idiosyncratic genius and fall woefully short.
A wholly engaging partial misfire, if that makes sense -- a spare yet stylish marginal recommendation that connects due to its provocative premise and ruminations on violence, and the considerations that spawns.
Audience Reviews for Surveillance
Super Reviewer
As this film began, I thought it was going to be a post-modern Rashomon -- the same story told from multiple perspectives with the post-modern conception that truth is mutable. David Lynch's daughter at the helm only furthered my suspicions. However, the characters' stories merely serve as diving boards for the director's objective reality, so the film has no post-modern twist or any original concept driving it forward. Lynch uses her father's scare tactics, slow shots of looming devilish figures straight out of a Carl Jung handbook for "scary," but these flourishes bore with over-use.
Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond are stolid until the last act, during which they become cartoons. The antics of the police officers and most of the other characters are so outlandish that they defy credulity; even in a small, out-of-the-way town, there's no way these officers could have gotten this far shooting out random travelers' tires and sexually assaulting drivers.
Overall, Lynch proves that she's her father's daughter, but she's without his ideas, which makes her a copycat, a poor excuse for the original.
Super Reviewer
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