Surveillance

IF SOME unconnected young tyro had directed this wretched thriller, then David Lynch might have sued for unacknowledged appropriation of style and tone. But, given that Jennifer Lynch is the great man’s daughter, he probably just sent her to bed with no supper. Let’s hope she stays there.

Fifteen years after the spectacular fiasco that was Boxing Helena, Jennifer seeks to energise a mundane mystery by imposing some off-the-peg, surreal madness upon it. Surveillancebegins by showing us hazy glimpses of a violent incident in the desert. We then join sharply dressed FBI agents Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond as they arrive at a rural police station to investigate another, related mass slaying.

The local cops, who combine the incompetence of Chief Wiggum with the brutality of Judge Dread, are herded into a room decorated with surveillance equipment and asked to explain inconsistencies in their reports. It seems that two particularly deranged officers spent their afternoons shooting out the tires of passing cars and terrorising the stranded drivers. The fun came to an end when they encountered a serial killer in a van.

Lynch has taken the material for a 50-minute cop show and fattened it up with inappropriate sexual grappling, explosive vomiting and lengthy stretches of wilfully misjudged absurdity. A key scene finds two carloads of characters clicking their fingers and singing along with a Violent Femmes song on the radio. It really is sad to behold. The sequence – and, indeed, the film’s entire last act – looks like the work of a half-bright film student paying incompetent homage to David Lynch while working on a 1985 graduation film.

The closing 10 minutes, in which several of the principles begin howling at the firmament while spitting lumps of masticated scenery at one another, does achieve a kind of resplendent, transcendental awfulness. I do, however, suspect that Lynch was trying for something a tad less laughable.