Anamorph

This is a very late entry in the Seven/Silence of the Lambs genre, so late that the filmmakers forgot exactly why they bothered. Going through the tedious motions of finding a killer, the movie gives us some pretentious crime scenes, a guilty protagonist and not much to distract from the murk or the derivations. Willem Dafoe has nothing to do, struggling against an alcoholic cop part that has no dimension beyond vague unhappiness. He’s naturally nonplussed to find a serial killer who creates baroque, meticulously composed crime scenes whose significance hinges on a trick perspective technique called "anamorphosis.” But where the action in most serial killer movies lies in the metaphors surrounding the murders, here the gimmick is all — things are not what they seem, there is something beneath the surface, Francis Bacon is awesome, etc. As Dafoe’s character has no connection to the killer beyond him possibly being an old collar, watching him trudge through is pretty boring; Scott Speedman is wasted as his partner; Peter Stormare’s art expert has way too much pretentious dialogue (not that he isn’t happy to oblige); and nobody acts as a human being really would. The film so clearly milks the trappings of its long-dead genre that there’s not much else to watch; it has nothing like the seething corruption of Seven or the quasi-feminist overtones of Lambs, meaning it goes through the motions without really understanding what those motions are. It’s professionally enough shot but if you had enough of this ultra-saturated gloom in the ’90s there’s no reason to go back to the well at this late date. Extras include a featurette that reveals the shallowness of the director and co-writer, and one deleted scene.