Gazer: 'paranoid noir chiller' is a gripping watch

Ariella Mastroianni as Frankie: sucked into a world of 'paranoia, crime and conspiracy'

(Image credit: Telstar Films / Album / Alamy)

A "genuine skin-crawling unease" haunts every moment of this elegant, "paranoid noir chiller", which was shot on 16mm on the "mean streets of Jersey City", said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Ariella Mastroianni (who also co-wrote the script) stars as Frankie, a woman living on the edge of poverty who suffers from the neurodegenerative disorders ataxia and dyschronometria; these leave her both disoriented and unable to accurately judge the passing of time – an affliction she tries to manage (in a nod to Christopher Nolan's "Memento") by recording memos to herself on 30-minute cassette tapes and gazing in through strangers' windows.

She is struggling for money when, at a group therapy session, she meets a mysterious woman, whom she remembers seeing through a window. The woman confides that she is being abused by her bullying cop brother, and offers Frankie $3,000 to break into the flat they share, and retrieve her car keys.

Naturally, the offer "proves too good to be true", said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times: there is a body in the car's boot, and Frankie is "sucked into a murky mare's nest of paranoia, crime and conspiracy", her ability to cope compromised by her "crumbling mind". In the first part of the film, Mastroianni and director Ryan J. Sloan build "a palpable air of dank menace", said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times; but the plot becomes murky before going fully off the rails. Sloan has seen a lot of films and cribs freely from the likes of Coppola's "The Conversation". This works well at times; in the end, however, "an amusing low-fi thriller" gets lost in the "thickets of cinematic allusion".