Siren hits shelves on August 18th. Here's our early review.
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| "Yo! Check out my hoody!" |
Siren,
the debut feature of writer-director Jesse Peyronel, is a science fiction
thriller which was made in 2013 but sat on the shelf until recently and with
good reason. Featuring Vinessa Shaw
(best remembered as the prostitute from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut) as a scientist living in seclusion due to a
mysterious pheromone she emits which turn male passerby into ravenous sexual
predators, it’s a film with an intriguing premise that unfortunately has too
many additional plot threads which don’t add up and do more harm than good when
they pad the film’s running time.
The
first hour works beautifully with simplicity, leaving the viewer scrambling to
connect the dots. But once we’ve figured
out the gist of the story, it falters and clichéd thriller elements such as a
covert military operation intent on exploiting Shaw’s inexplicable condition as
well as an underdeveloped thread involving a necklace with secret powers are
unconvincingly shoehorned into the film, deflating whatever dramatic power Siren was building towards. In other words, it begins strong before
squandering its strength in the second half by trying to do too much for little
avail.
Acting overall is generally good although Shaw isn’t
entirely convincing as a scientist.
Robert Kazinsky from Pacific Rim makes
an alright drifter devoid of his sense of smell turned protector of Shaw even
if he too closely resembles Kirk Cameron for comfort. The soundtrack couldn’t help but remind me of
Sigur Ros’ Angels of the Universe
with its ethereal strings and distant vocals.
It’s disappointing that Siren does
have some great visual ideas in it that never really coalesce, including a
recurring, startling motif of blood seen from a cellular microscopic level
which is both lovely and unsettling to behold.
Eerie scenes of zombified men stopping dead in the tracks possessed by
Shaw’s pheromones have a haunting quality to them and reminded me of the
strange followers in Richard Kelly’s The
Box. To combat the dangerous and
unwanted male attention which comes to Shaw’s doorstep, she’s rigged her
isolated homestead with electrified fences and security cameras, her house
decorated at random with CRT monitors resembling the now obsolete Vectrex videogame
system. Scenes like these have an abstract
power to them at first glance until the logic behind them is explained
away.
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| "This might be the perfect concoction to get his movie right!" |
For much of Siren,
the intrigue stems from the mystery where we get a lot of scenery but not many
answers as to what it all means. Once we
find out, it’s a letdown which should be elevating everything that proceeded
beforehand instead of negating it. You
could read Siren as an existential
metaphor about womanhood in the face of aggressive sexual desire, but the
problem is the logic behind the premise doesn’t necessarily work in the world
of the movie. Somewhere in the footage
is a much better shorter film that might have actually worked better if we
remained in the dark about it. Like the
unsuspecting men in Siren, we’re
drawn into the film’s strange allure but ultimately rebel against it once we
begin to understand why. If
some of the unnecessary threads were dropped and if we were trusted to connect
the dots ourselves, Siren could have
been a truly interesting science fiction thriller. As it is, we’re left with a movie that feels
like it’s trying too hard to convey its message.
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SCORE
-Andrew Kotwicki