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An Organized Killer
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Is it tele-thriller convention – as distinct from a cine-thriller one – to centre intimacy thriller plots around the POV of the incoming stranger, rather than the married couple or family unit? I wondered about this while watching the mildly diverting An Organized Killer. This film starts with what might seem to be a flash-forward preview of a ghastly moment in the narrative to come, but which turns out (since it’s barely alluded to again) as a linear prologue: Lilith (Samantha Cope), masked up a little like Irma Vep, dispatches her lesbian partner in water, and moves on without being detected or captured … Next, we are plunged into the somewhat difficult daily life of Grace (Allison McAtee) – recently divorced, raising a sulky teenage daughter, Charlie (Aubrey Stevens, who does sulky well), and hoping to relaunch a restaurant business. There’s a relatively large (for this sort of story) constellation of characters around Grace: two gal pals (they all seem to live in the same upmarket block or nook), an ex-husband (Damon Carney as James) struggling to quit the booze, and a “heroic” young lover from among the bartending help, Alex (Andrew Spach). But, with a deft turn of the plot, Grace discovers that the new prospective roommate she auditions has just been watching, listening and auditioning her – and thus Lilith re-enters, unmasked, to soon become Grace’s organiser/assistant, and therefore the person with (literally) the keys, codes and passwords to everything. The multi-character spread allows for a twist, late in proceedings, that I won’t give away, and that I didn’t see coming. From the moment Lilith takes charge, the POV is, most of the time, with her: we see her pause before retrieving the asthma inhaler while Charlie has a prolonged attack (Mom, meanwhile, yaps on her mobile ten feet away, but sees and hears nothing through the glass); we follow her on menacing visits to the gal pals (such as the histrionic one who glimpses Lilith perving on the Grace/Alex kitchen love-play), and so on. The answer to my opening compositional genre-question about POV would doubtless be a matter of shifting degrees between cinema and TV. Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), after all, started with the murderous Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) and played out a similar game of his superior position of seeing/hearing/knowing poised above that of most of the other family members – until, that is, Young Charlie (Teresa Wright) starts her deep investigation. And there are certainly other, similar examples. My hunch, though, is that tele-thrillers like this choose generally to work on a curious premise of strict functionality: they eschew the mystery-identity angle (who really is this new person in the household?) that would come with centring the POV on the innocent/unknowing couple/family, and go straight for the mechanical, sadistic delight of watching a psychopath call the shots, manipulating everything and everyone. I have recently read, with a great deal of pleasure, Matt Strohl’s Why It’s OK to Love Bad Movies (2022). The book reminds me of a long-held principle of genre appreciation: you can scan films for their involvement in a system or pack of roughly similar works, and thus for their variations or intensifications of a formula – rather than for some spurious originality in every, individual case. An Organized Killer is certainly of a pack. It’s intriguing to check off elements: the heightened sexual aspect of Grace’s character (much is made of her well-toned, mature body!); the creepy gladhanding and then advanced cruelty of Lilith (mythological name); the strong and sudden moments of violence and torture (asthmatic Charlie locked in a sauna turned to top heat … ). And there’s the final drone shots that (like in Walter Hill’s Dead for a Dollar [2022]) actually manage to include or advance a bit of story, rather than just listlessly glide over a landscape for routine punctuation. That’s something to applaud while loyally passing to the next tele-thriller in the queue … © Adrian Martin 7 October 2022 |
