Hasn’t
anyone ever seen I Know What You Did Last
Summer? If you hit a sketchy dude by the side of the road, just call the
cops. It will be so much easier that way in the long run. Lindsey and Jeff
Pittman do not do that, but they have some good excuses. Like, maybe it was
self-defense and they didn’t even know it. Things get complicated quickly in Julius
Ramsay’s Midnighters (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.
Jeff
Pittman should have made a New Year’s resolution to get a job, or at least not mow
people down when his blood alcohol is over the limit. Since he and his wife
Lindsey are already under a lot of stress, they agree to temporarily remove the
body from the accident scene that they tidy up as best they can, with the intention
of returning to face the music once they have sobered up. It is a swell plan
that can’t fail, until they notice the rather thuggish looking man had their
address in his pocket. If he was coming to do them ill, it stands to reason,
there will be more like him coming in his stead.
Jeff
Pittman blames his sister in-law Hannah, which both women resent, even though
he is more right than wrong. She had moved back in with the couple after the
death of her well-heeled older lover, doing their already strained marriage no
favors. It turns out, the late boyfriend was even more mobbed up than she realized.
As further visitors turn up, both Jeff and Hannah will try to turn Lindsey
against each other, as their New Year turns into A Simple Plan.
Midnighters has some devious
twists and turns, but like the Sam Raimi film, it reflects a sense of working
class economic malaise. Eighteen grand is not too small a sum to kill someone
for in the Pittmans’ world. This is indeed hardscrabble New England, with the
emphasis on hard.
Based
on her knock-out work in Starry Eyes and
Tales of Halloween, Alex Essoe is
poised to join the ranks of today’s pseudo rep company of hip horror movie
specialists, but she is surprisingly restrained and withdrawn as Lindsey
Pittman. In contrast, Dylan McTee brings plenty of cutting attitude and
intensity as Jeff. However, Perla Haney-Jardine is just a pill but that is
apparently how Ramsay and his screenwriter brother Alston intended her to be.
Cinematographer
Alexander Alexandrov makes it all look dark and sinister, in a “wicked” New
England kind of way. This is a tense, gritty, and tightly executed film that is
too grounded to be horror, but definitely shares some of the stylistic elements.
Recommended for fans of one-darned-thing-after-another thrillers, Midnighters opens this Friday (3/2) in
New York, at the IFC Center.
