Fear X (2003)

The bastard child in Refn's filmography. The ugly deformed misfit no one likes to speak of, the one they keep locked in the basement, where no daylight can reach it. It's kind of sad how this movie is mostly notorious for being the one that broke Refn's career, put him in an enormous debt and forced him to return to Denmark to make two sequels to his, at that point in his life, most successful movie, Pusher.

Many people seem to dislike this movie and I can totally understand that. It is not cool like Drive is. It lacks the manic energy of Bronson. It’s a slow, idiosyncratic movie, that barely has a real plot to speak of. The entire thing reeks of pretentions. It is also 100% my kinda shit. 

Just for those of you who have no idea what Fear X is about (which is a lot since not many people have actually taken the time to just sit down and watch it). The movie revolves around Harry Caine (John Turturro), a security agent working at the local mall, who is left all alone and disillusioned after his wife was murdered a year or so earlier. In a desperate attempt to find any kind of closure about what happened, Harry obsessively studies mall security videotapes every night after he gets home from work, hoping to catch a glimpse of the murderous deed and perhaps, ideally, the one who committed it.  

Yet it is obviously clear to us, the viewer, that Harry will never find what he is craving for this way. The stills he takes from those video tapes are too grainy to recognize anything or anyone on them. The only actual clue he unravels that puts him on the right track, he discovers by some odd coincidence.

John Torturro is perfectly cast for this role. Harry is not some Charles Bronson kind of vigilante, this is a regular man who had his whole life wrecked and ruined, and now has to deal with the aftermath of it every single day. He looks a bit sickly, doesn’t seem to be eating or sleeping well. He is clearly a haunted, miserable person, who probably would’ve killed himself by now if he didn’t have this quest to dedicate his lonely hours to. Yet Torturro manages to maintain the humanity behind this character, therefore not pushing the audience away, but instead inviting them into his troubled psyche. 

Similar to films like Barton Fink (an association that is unavoidable when your movie features both John Turturro and a nightmare hotel) and The Shining (Kubrick is undeniably the main influence throughout all of Refn’s filmography), Fear X places his viewers in the uncomfortable position of having to identify with a main character that is slowly losing his grip on reality and descending into their own subjective hell. But don't be mistaken, this is not a horror movie (like it wrongfully got billed as on its initial release) nor can you really call it a thriller. It is far too cerebral and cold to be enjoyed as that. Refn is clearly not interested in making a straight genre film, rather taking cues from those kinds of movies and using them to express the restlessness and uneasiness of this character.  

Refn effectively creates a collage of visual clues that are both unsettling and eerie, putting us in the same paranoid mind state that Harry finds himself in. Every person in this movie looks suspicious, making us wonder if there is anyone left to trust. And then there is the brilliant score by Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm, that is evocative yet subtle at the same time. The kind of score that settles into your unconsciousness and regulates your experience of watching the movie, without you even realizing it is there. 

 

Like one of Kubrick's favorite movies, The Vanishing, halfway through the film the perspective temporarily switches to the one of the murderer, Lt. Peter Northrup (James Remar), before coming back to our tragic protagonist. We see how he interacts with his wife and young kid, we get a feel of his daily life, and how all of that seems threatened now that Harry is on to him. The movie even reveals what actually happened to Harry's wife long before the actual climax, seemingly to give us a better understanding of the internal emotional conflictations in both of our prominent characters, yet there are still many clues left that suggest there is more to the story than what is presented to us. 

Eventually the film entirely removes the expectations of a straight genre film in its ambiguous anti-climax, turning against the viewer in a way that for me wasn't disappointing but rather knocked me out and left me gasping for air.