John Simpson (2004)
In 1993 Sean Veil was accused of the shooting of a mother and her young twin daughters. His trial collapsed due to lack of prosecution evidence. The father of the family was wounded in the assault and hanged himself on the day the trial ended. In the ten years since, Veil has led a subterranean life: convinced that the police will try again to set him up, he records every moment of his existence to ensure that he always has an alibi. His habitation, where he spends days and nights under constant self-imposed surveillance, is like a very spacious prison cell. (The film was shot in the Crumlin Road jail in Belfast, according to Wikipedia.) Its most notable feature, apart from the rows of cameras and banks of tapes, is a furnace, which completes the hellish ambience.
The pyrotechnics of the opening sequence establish the film’s style and priorities immediately. The writer-director John Simpson (whose first feature this is) is so preoccupied with the visual possibilities of his main idea that he doesn’t give the protagonist or his setting any further context. Throughout the picture, there’s no distinction between Veil’s paranoid perspective and the way the world is photographed even when it’s not being seen from his point of view. There are grids and shadows and harsh, blue-white glare everywhere you look. If Simpson is making the point that we-all-live-in-a-surveillance-society (which may not have been quite as tired an idea in 2004 as it’s since become), that point isn’t conducive to dramatic variety or excitement. Freeze Frame is so technically over-insistent – and with the main character in extremis – from the start that it doesn’t (can’t) build at all. The few opportunities to turn down the volume for a few moments (in order to turn it back up again) are wasted – notably a poorly-staged and badly-acted scene in which the ‘forensic profiler’ Seger, who helped the police try to get Veil convicted, is launching his new book and gets asked a difficult question by Katie Carter, a reporter from a Crimewatch-like TV programme. (Katie Carter turns out to be Katie Jasper, the elder sister of the murdered twins. It seems unlikely that the surviving member of a family who’ve died in these circumstances would have found her identity quite so easy to conceal in the oppressive tabloid culture which Simpson presents as essential to the world in which Freeze Frame takes place.)
Just about the only, momentary breathing spaces occur when Veil voices items on a list of ‘things to remember’ and the words he speaks appear on the screen – a bit like the device used (wittily) in The Naked Civil Servant. (One of Veil’s axioms includes the word ‘principle’ when it should be ‘principal’: I’d like to think this was an intentional bit of characterisation – a spelling mistake made by Veil rather than the filmmakers – but I don’t.) The working out of the plot is obvious, uninventive and eventually ridiculous. Nearly all the members of the small cast come under suspicion at some stage and most of them are gorily dead by close of business.
Removing his body hair is another part of Veil’s unending self-exculpation project: with his shaven head, Lee Evans looks a cross between Norman Wisdom and John Malkovich. He’s as physically energetic as you might expect and his strong engagement with the character is likeable – but his performance gets to be as monotonous as the film (and the Frank Spencer-ish cadences are slightly distracting, as if to reassure that this is really Lee Evans). Sean McGinley is uneasily stiff as Emeric, the cop out to get Veil, and Ian McNeice overacts as Steger. As Katie, Rachael Stirling looks right but she’s wooden (except in her final scene) – she suggests a television journalist pretending to be an actress. The most effective contribution is from Colin Salmon, as the second-in-command policeman Mountjoy. Salmon plays naturalistically – Mountjoy seems to belong to a real world – but he uses his strong face and presence in ways that make us see why Veil feels threatened by him.
27 June 2009
