Fear X

The story of Mall security guard, Harry Cain, who's wife is mysteriously murdered in Wisconsin.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

MARK LAWSON:
Kwame, I walked to this through a very tense London and pictures of Madrid on television, and in that sense seems very timely.

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
It is. But I think it is a wonderful film and I found it thematically and visually beautiful. A stunning central performance by John Turturro, who understates but yet moves forward, who brings you into his world but yet makes you wonder whether he is good or bad or right or wrong, it's a beautiful film.

LAWSON:
Tom Paulin, he picks up a lot on the CCTV footage, and that is powerful. Jamie Bulger, Princess Diana, almost all major incidents now, there is CCTV. They use that very well I think.

TOM PAULIN:
A very powerful film about anxiety, about guilt somewhere in white Anglo- Saxon Protestant America, something to do with the law or the people administering the law corrupt, what's going on? Very, very, very powerful and then it loses it within sight of the end. It goes hay wire, the plot goes hay wire, you don't know where you are and it ends badly. It doesn't work.

NATASHA WALTER:
I completely disagree. We can't give away the ending but I just thought the ending was wonderful. This is a film that surprises you. I felt that I knew somehow where the film was going. I felt I knew the genre it was sitting in, the little guy and the bumbling cops around him, who are kind of hostile, he'd expose their corruption. Then it did something else and turned itself into an inward journey, a psychological journey. It left you wondering whether what you had been watching was at some points a dream, or whether it had been entirely objective.

PAULIN:
But it lets itself off the hook because ...

WALTER:
It doesn't.

KWEI-ARMAH:
I don't think so at all.

PAULIN:
There is an awful abstract bit towards the end.

KWEI-ARMAH:
I loved that abstract bit because it made me think. I think the director says he didn't want to make a film we could predict. He wanted to construct something that made us think.

PAULIN:
He make a film he couldn't end because the plot, I have to say, goes hay wire. You don't finally know where you are and there isn't, finally it doesn't face up to itself. It is something to do with forgetting and forgiveness.

WALTER:
It is not meant to be a realist film thought, it has got a symbolic element to it.

PAULIN:
It has a symbolic element and there is a symbolic political theme but it finally doesn't get it together.

LAWSON:
He is trying to make a paranoid film and there are quite clear references to the Conversations, because the central character is almost the same name. Arlington Road I thought all that was there. But it's a more arty version of it. But Hubert Selby Jr, a man in his mid-70s, Last Exit To Brooklyn is still read by teenagers, amazingly, he has still got this ability to tap into what is going on because it feels like a young person's film.

WALTER:
It does. Also it felt to me a bit like something like Twin Peaks, but it has this more...

KWEI-ARMAH:
A rooted centre, I felt.

WALTER:
Exactly. It has that central character, driven by the central performance, as you say. That is moving, David Lynch doesn't have that stable psychological core in that way.