Jason says: “My only
issues with CREEP have nothing whatsoever to do with the movie itself.
First, there’s the generic title – it’s only been ten years since the
movie by that name with Franka Potente – and word that two sequels are
already planned. I don’t know how that works. But look at the movie
itself, and it’s a work of minimalist near-perfection, tremendously
funny and with just enough edge to be a legitimate thriller.
“It starts with Aaron (Patrick Brice) telling his camera that he’s been
hired for a bit of video work, and while it’s kind of weird, a job’s a
job. This one involves following Josef (Mark Duplass) for a day, as he
is dying of a brain tumor and wants to leave a testimonial for his
unborn son. And while Josef seems very friendly, he’s also, to put it
mildly, eccentric.
“It is a dead-simple premise; Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass have come
up with a good reason for a found-footage style movie to be generating
said footage and execute it almost by themselves, improvising much of
the dialog from their story with Brice directing and shooting from the
camera used in-story. They pile every joke that they can on and sell
the heck out of each, whether they are shaggy-dog stories, one-liners,
or putting a scene together visually in a way that’s both funny and
disturbing. CREEP is a tremendously funny movie, and even when it
starts getting into more unsettling territory, the jokes are perfectly
executed. It’s ‘wait, what?’ humor executed more or less perfectly.
“Part of that comes from one of Duplass’s best comedic performances,
with the extremely prolific actor and filmmaker slipping into the part
of Josef as if he was made for it, smiling ingratiatingly with
boy-next-door charm and always able to return to a sort of innocent
generosity even after doing something weird or even kind of sinister.
Brice, meanwhile, excels as the ever-more-nervous straight man trying
to make allowances for Josef’s circumstances but also strongly
suspecting that this whole situation crossed over into ‘too weird for
me’ a while ago. He does most of it with his voice, but deadpans well
when his face does make it on camera.
“This gets a little more difficult to justify as the movie goes on and
the humor gets darker; the story-starter that makes doing the whole
movie from a first-person perspective gets a little stretched later on,
relying on generated goodwill and the characters’ odd habits to get the
audience to overlook it. It mostly works – they’ve built up a lot of
that goodwill and are good enough at finding the humorously absurd bits
in the unsettling situations that any shift in tone is gradual. Brice
and editor, Christopher Donlon, keep it feeling loose and un-rushed but
also tight; there’s not a second wasted.
“It’s kind of brilliant, especially if you’re already a fan of
Duplass’s offbeat brand of humor and don’t mind seeing it twisted into
something a little stranger. I worry about continuing it – this movie
is self-contained and I don’t see how the way it makes use of the
first-person style is repeatable. Maybe I’m wrong and the fact that the
current plan is to release a whole trilogy in 2015 means the filmmakers
have a plan. Even if they don’t, this movie is great. 5 cats” |
