Distorted

Christopher Lee has been credited online for saying that every actor who has been in the business long enough will make a bad film from time to time. The key is to not be bad in them. Whether this is an actual quote by the man or just Mia attributed to him, the message is clear. Do your best, even in the worst schlock you get cast in. Mr. Lee was, for instance, in Police Academy: Mission to Moscow, after all. He knows all about being in utter rubbish. Whether he was any good in it…well, let’s just say he wasn’t the worst thing in that movie. So what’s that have to do with 2018’s Distorted? That will become obvious as I get further into it.

Lauren Curran (Christina Ricci) is a house wife who suffers from bipolar disorder thanks to an incident in her past where a home invasion left her injured and her infant child dead, drown in the bathtub. Her husband, Russell (Brendan Fletcher) suggests moving into a secure high-tech luxury apartment outside the city and, after some initial trepidation, she agrees. But almost immediately she begins to suspect that things are not alright in the new location. She sees words flash across the television screen, strange sounds emanating from the speakers through the apartment, and a young man, ostensibly struggling with depression and anxiety, jumps from the roof to his death right in front of her. She goes to her husband with her concerns but he dismisses them as a sign of her disorder, suggesting instead that she check herself in to a mental health clinic. This forces her to reach out to a mystery man online who turns out to be hacker/conspiracy theorist Vernon Sarsfield (John Cusack), a man who believes her story and thinks something is being done to her against her will. 

There are a myriad of problems with this movie. First of all, it is paced so poorly that it’s hard to keep with the story. I’m not saying it’s hard to follow because it’s not. The pacing problem makes it hard to want to keep up with it. It spends an unevenly large amount of time setting things up, then shifts into a higher gear and just rushes through the second half. At about the fifty minute mark it goes from slow and deliberate to suddenly needing to shove an hours worth of plot into a thirty minute window. This gives the second half of the film a choppy feel to it as it jumps from one moment to the next without anything to join those moments together. It’s a sloppy way to tell the story and feels like either the studio demanded cuts or there wasn’t enough in the budget to fill in those gaps. It’s probably a combination of the two situations.

These types of problems could be smoothed over with a stand-out performance by the two leads. Unfortunately, this film doesn’t have that at all. Brendan Fletcher is bland and generic as the husband. He has no stand-out scenes at all and could have been played by anyone. Nothing he does here is interesting. His character is poorly written, too. A better script would have cast some suspicion on whether he was involved or not. Here, there isn’t enough nuance to even suggest that as a possibility. We get no real sense of affection from him. We also get no sense of malice, either, leaving him as a blank slate. Better films such as the original The Stepford Wives or Rosemary’s Baby sprinkle in enough character into the husbands that doubt is nearly omnipresent about them. Such is not the case here. We never really believe he may be in on the plot against his wife.

Christina Ricci doesn’t fare much better. She is capable of more than this. She plays a similarly neurotic woman in 2009’s After.Life and, while that film isn’t great either, does a much better job selling the emotional distress her character is going through. In Distorted, she is barely putting on a performance at all. She’s really a blank slate here, not selling the emotional damage of a woman who has recently lost a child through a violent attack. We get a brief glimpse of this damage in a swimming pool scene at the mid-point but it’s so understated that the director has to rely on some rapid flashbacks to try and convey what his lead actress is not. It’s a shortcut for a bad performance and Ricci is better than this.

The third piece of the triangle is John Cusack, another actor who started out young and has managed to stay in the game into adulthood. John’s career has had many highs and lows throughout the decades but, even in some of the worst stuff he’s appeared in, he has been competent in it. Here, he is definitely muted. Yet, with little to work with, he manages to pull out a semblance of a character. It’s not great, but it’s still a little fun when he’s on-screen. Unfortunately, he’s introduced late in the game and is dispatched off screen. His character deserved a heroes moment, not this unceremonious write-off.

The central premise of this movie revolves around subliminal messages hypnotizing someone to commit murder. It’s well known that subliminal messages don’t really work; even the film calls this out. It’s also well known that you cannot hypnotize a person to do something that violates their moral core. So right away this film’s premise is on shaky ground. A good script can get past such weaknesses. Instead, we’re asked to ignore the obvious and just go with it, accepting that maybe the villain has found a way to bypass what we know as truth. If the film had explained this possible method we might be able to give it its premise. It doesn’t. We’re expected to just accept that it is thus. This is a real disappointment. It wouldn’t have saved the film but it would have gone a long way towards helping it.

Christina Ricci seems to know she has signed up for a film that is not very good. Perhaps that’s why she’s not really trying here. Actors and actresses sometimes have to take whatever they can get to pay the bills. But, like the words I lead off with attributed to the late Christopher Lee, you need to be good, even in bad films. When you’re not, you will continue to be cast in schlocky junk like this. It lacks any real meat to it and, while it goes down quickly, it leaves a bitter taste behind. It needed to be better and there was an opportunity for that here. It just didn’t cash in on that opportunity.

Release Date: June 22, 2018

Running Time: 86 Minutes

Rated: R

Starring: Christina Ricci, John Cusack and Brendan Fletcher

Directed By: Rob W. King