REVIEW - SIMON KILLER

A slick, glossy trawl around the gutters of one man's mind, but like digital cleans up the noise in an analogue signal, Simon Killer is spare and sterile. Less of a physical tramp through his putrid headspace than a comfortable, clean stroll through images and accounts of it, on shiny, impenetrable surfaces. Being an art film, as all contemporary serial killer dramas feel obliged to be, it isolates elements, compartmentalises them, assigning bleak psychoanalysis to certain corners of the film, and grit and distortion, ever so delicately depicted, to others. Like pixels on a screen, the closer you look, the more it is revealed to be an assortment of separate particles instead of a complete, coalescing portrait. Antonio Campos' obsession with simplicity and starkness sucks most of the feeling out of Simon Killer, as he executes scenes and sequences with a rigorous eye for formal detailing, and negligence for the kind of emotional insight that might have given his film some weight, some purpose. Because, alas, as impressive a job as he has done in assembling all these components to create a film, his style and his method are bland and derivative, hollow reiterations of motifs and techniques which may once have been clever and compelling, but only for their uniqueness. There's very little unique about Simon Killer. Brady Corbet's character is unfortunately average - he's not quite a blank slate, a fascinating void of sociopathic passivity. He's too involved in the lives of those around him, too conscious, too responsive, but beyond that he's quite unremarkable. Basically, he's a typical straight, white, 20-something male in Paris, apparently capable of considerable evil, but only apparently (for the most part). Campos fills the runtime with scenes of supposed sordidness, but Simon's desires are not nearly as aberrant as they're intended to seem, and the careful avoidance of the most graphic imagery in these instances is representative of the middle-brow notions of envelope-pushing under which this entire film languishes.