Fantasia ’10 Review: ‘TWISTED SEDUCTION’ AND ‘PHASMA EX MACHINA’

Reviews are still coming in from Fantasia Film Festival.  Again, thanks to Nightmare Revue for allowing us to republish the coverage of the festival and thanks again to Michael Mitchell for his writeups.  Read on for the reviews…

By Michael Mitchell

Compared to filming a movie, one benefit of mounting a stageplay is that you can debut it in front of an audience, and then it can still be reworked and reworked time and again—in front of audience after audience—until the weaker elements are stripped out and you’ve got a more polished creation. And sometimes it’s only an audience that can show you what the defects in the work are. Which is the function test audiences perform for major movie releases. They don’t like the ending to “Fatal Attraction” so the studio gets all the talent back together for a weekend and they film the home-wrecking bitch getting shot in the bathtub. Great! Done! Ship it out! But that’s if you have the budget for it, and if the script is strong enough that all that is required is a touched up scene to send it out into the merry world. Sadly, you usually don’t have the luxury of reworking an entire movie if the whole thing is a bit off the mark. I think the standard course of action is you either live with it and try to make what money back you can, or, to use the same word in another capacity, you simply can it.

That said, Dominque Adams’ TWISTED SEDUCTION has the potential of being a really great stageplay. About a woman abducted by a man (they have names but with the way the characters are presented to us as the embodiment of the sexes, they can just as readily be termed “Man” and “Woman”) in the belief that she will eventually come to love him as if they had embarked on a series of conventional dates, Adams’ movie looks really good, with intelligent and interesting camera work and a number of well-directed scenes. But, ultimately, as the main conceit doesn’t hold up from scene to scene, there isn’t much that makes sense in the end.

Right after being abducted (and while bound to a chair), Woman is told that, as long as she follows the rules, she won’t be hurt and she will be fed. She ignores the advice and spends the next half day without food or drink. We know it’s been a half day not only because Man comes in and tells us it’s been a half day, but there are also interstitial titles that are projected in blackouts, complete with day and time, between the “scenes.” I write scenes in quotations because sometimes we get the title cards, sometimes we don’t—and it’s never quite clear why they’re absent sometimes. Actually, it’s never quite clear why they’re there sometimes. Also, we sometimes go from one scene to the next for no apparent reason (other than possibly the filming schedule), when it could have worked just as well or better to simply extend the current scene. For a scene to indeed be a new scene something has to have changed or progressed in a story. But we don’t get that all the time in TWISTED SEDUCTION. Sometimes we get a blackout that involves only a minute or two’s passing on screen. Now, if this were a Michael Haneke movie (he of “Funny Games”, “Hidden”, “The White Ribbon,” etc., fame) I would assume that the inconsistent use blackouts and title cards was intentional, but I can’t be sure it is with Adams. And I couldn’t quite figure out why we were given the exact same exterior shot of the loft numerous times, either. (I wouldn’t have even questioned it if not for the scene with the bird, which seems written in due to there being a bird trapped in the loft they were filming in.) Perhaps Adams is an auteur of great depth, but that’ll only be shown once she’s got a few more films under her belt.

Woman’s reactions to Man’s requests just never seems entirely valid. Trapped and locked inside a practically barren loft we find her either practicing yoga or calmly reading a book on a couch. And then all it takes for her to salsa dance with Man at one point is for him to produce a pair of red shoes. There just doesn’t seem to be anything at stake for her, no reason to go along with Man’s wishes. The only time she was deprived of food it was supposed to be for 24 hours, but Man relents and makes it only 12. So we see that she has some power over him from the beginning, but that is never explored. But that threat of withheld food seems to be what forces her to go along with the candlelit dinners, the salsa dancing, the fully-clothed bathing. On one of the “dates” Woman even asks Man, “What is this supposed to accomplish? What is the point of this?” Funny, I was asking myself the same thing. At one point she even bashes him in the head with a golf club and all he does is write a message on his shirt asking her not to do it again. So, is he afraid of some types of violence but not others, and is that something she should have explored as well?

While watching the individual scenes it was easy to forget that Woman had been abducted against her will as they interacted like two old acquaintances most of the time; albeit the standard boy has a crush on girl but girl thinks he’s a dweeb kind. At one point, Woman shoots Man the finger, but there’s nothing in story that suggests she should be so cavalier and brash, nothing that says he won’t cut that finger off. When Paul Sheldon gave Annie the finger in “Misery” she had already broken both his ankles and told him there was no way he was ever leaving, so he had nothing to lose really. But Woman still seems like she still has too much to lose in TWISTED to be acting the way she does. Where Annie showed us how disturbed she was, Man never does anything. Was that the point? Then, an interesting line of inquiry may have been why he never reacted to any of her provocations. As it was, the scenes kept playing like Man and Woman were two people shipwrecked on an island. And was a way-too willing participant most of the time. And a way, way-too willing concubine at the end, never once questioning her lack of freedom—or choice in the matter.

There’s a lot of material that doesn’t get mined that could have been. For one, Man is British. This seems to be important, as he talks of his heritage and his education, but I’m just not sure why it is important. We’re told the action takes place in Montreal, Canada as well. Man chose Montreal to conduct his experiment in gender relations as it’s a cosmopolitan city. But then Man goes ahead and abducts a white bread Caucasian Woman, which he could have done almost anywhere. So, does it have something to do with colonialism? Old world meets new world? The set, as well-thought out as it is, seems underused as well. There’s a clock on the wall that as the potential of tormenting Woman but she never seems to even so much as glance at it once. Again, were this a stageplay, the clock could have a decidedly dramatic effect.

If I could give Adams any advice, it would be to rewrite the movie into a stageplay and have it play across the country. At two characters it’s sure to be an easy sell, and, if the subtext were played out more effectively, it’d be sure to be a hit.

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PHASMA EX MACHINA is metaphysical meditation of sorts by Matt Osterman, that, possibly owing to the long stretches of dialogue that are meant to connect us to the characters more than to the plot, doesn’t entirely cohere. The story involves something about a machine that makes it easier for some dead people to come back but not necessarily the dead people you were expecting and it also works for some people that have been in contact with you or something but it won’t work with everyone you know but only some people and a dead wife will come back to do the dishes and sleep in the bed and the husband will send his new girlfriend away without explaining that the dead wife he mentioned has come back to life and there’s something about an older brother potentially losing the custody of his younger brother (the folks are dead, but there’s insurance money so no one has to work-phew!) and then living people get angry and knock other people out with shovels and some neighbours can see some dead and some people can’t and stuff like that and has events occurring that may owe a wee bit to “The Sixth Sense” and “Solaris”. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty strong debut and should garner Osterman some deserved attention.