PIERCING

MAYBE CONTAINS SPOILERS, I'M NOT SURE

Okay, so I take an extended break from new movies (apart from cinema releases, and even then nowhere near as many of them as usual) and instead concentrate on filling in gaps from the 1950s. I finally fire up my New/Recent rentals queue and this is the first random title to drop through the letterbox. It got added to the list solely because it was one of last year's FrightFest choices (I was watching a decently creepy nun movie in one of the other screens at the time) and to be blunt I think I dodged a massive bullet.

Piercing starts off with what looks like a reasonable horror/thriller set-up: businessman Reed (Christopher Abbott) is off for a meeting but what he's actually planning to do is murder a prostitute. He's got it all worked out: precisely what to say, how much chloroform to use, what to do with the body...except that the girl who arrives (Mia Wasikowska) doesn't oblige by following his scheme, instead quickly raising a host of red flags by mutilating herself in the bathroom with scissors. Or is this all part of her weird scheme?

Okay, maybe I just didn't get Piercing. Maybe there's something in there I missed, like whatever it was supposed to be in the last shot of Haneke's Cache (Hidden) or the whole point of Mulholland Drive. Maybe I and/or the film are too dumb/smart or not dumb/smart enough to work out clearly how much of the film is actually in Reed's (or even Jackie's?) mind. Maybe the soundtrack, needledropped from vintage giallo scores including Tenebrae and The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, is too familiar from its original sources and doesn't belong in a film with only hints of giallo: it's more an oddball dark comedy with more than a touch of Audition about it (no surprise that it's from a novel by the same writer). Maybe it's the elaborate cardboard cityscape lending an unreal Anomalisa air to the whole film.

Whatever the reason, it did nothing but annoy from the start. It's hard to get much of a grip on either of the two characters, one of whom is planning to kill the other (and has probably done it before) while the other has her own brand of unfathomable kookiness. There's also an entirely gratuitous nipple-piercing that's there for no reason beyond justifying the otherwise meaningless title and pushing your yuk buttons at the same time. Worst case scenario is that it's a load of old tripe; best case scenario is that I just didn't get it and still don't.

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