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| Images courtesy of Kino Lorber and Paramount Pictures |
The brilliant filmmaking career of Edmund Elias Merhige aka
E. Elias Merhige is sadly as well as inexplicably short lived in the annals of
visionary experimental sensory excesses.
Starting in 1989 with his years-in-the-making student performance art
film Begotten before landing work with Nicolas Cage’s production of Shadow
of the Vampire in the year 2000 featuring an Oscar nominated performance by
Willem Dafoe opposite John Malkovich, things looked promising for the gothic
horror infused indie darling. Characterized
by flickering grainy images of an almost spiritual metaphysical manifest where
the film itself is like a Pentecostal text, Merhige quickly established himself
as a formidable as well as intellectually provocative audiovisual artist.
And then came his third feature Suspect Zero in 2004,
a surreal crime detective thriller of sorts with leanings towards ESP ability
or more specifically ‘remote viewing’ starring Ben Kingsley, Aaron Eckhart and
Carrie-Anne Moss. Despite being a sizable
project featuring star power, a screenplay by new hotshot Hollywood writer Zak
Penn, cinematography by the legendary Michael Chapman and pulsating brooding
score by Clint Mansell, the film was a huge failure with mixed to middling
reviews and Merhige’s career seemed to screech to a halt with it. Rumor has it Tom Cruise was debating starring
in this project spoken of the same breath as Vanilla Sky by way of Se7en
but he chose Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut over it, a career move
that seems to have dodged a bullet.
Years later, thanks to the efforts of Kino Lorber who have
given the film a new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative and an
HDR/Dolby Vision passthrough and the generous participation of the film’s
mercurial director, filmgoers now have a chance to take a look at one of the
strangest, most audacious if not shakily landed serial killer thrillers of the
2000s as well as track one of the most extraordinary filmmakers of the late
1980s and onward on his way to petering out.
Included on the disc are an audio commentary by the director, an
archival four-part featurette, a ‘remote viewing’ demonstration and an unused
ending with optional director commentary.
Following tormented FBI agent Thomas Mackelway (Aaron
Eckhart) who is tasked with investigating a string of strange murders with his
former partner Frank Kulok (Carrie-Anne Moss), his trail brings him to a
character named Benjamin O’Ryan (Ben Kingsley) who claims to have taken part in
a secret program that enables ‘remote viewing’ or telepathically transmitted
images from the mind of a serial killer in the act of a crime. It’s a screwy concept that doesn’t always
work but the actors do their best to sell it with Kingsley looking ominous and
threatening ala Sexy Beast while director Merhige ratchets up the psychedelia
and black-and-white grainy montages. The
film itself feels somewhere between the aforementioned Se7en with oddly
gothic overtones from Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil while also being a
precognitive psychological thriller with hints of Minority Report and Zodiac
peppered in.
Supposedly loosely based on a real 1978 Fort Meade, Maryland
project called The Stargate Project involving investigating the
possibility of ‘remote viewing’ for military applications, Suspect Zero is
even for an already eccentric filmmaker a truly really very weird Hollywood
thriller. Conceptually dealing in familiar
terrain but with a twist that threatens to undermine everything that came
before, its an ambitious project that perhaps bites off more than it can chew
despite maintaining a thoroughly bleak overtone. Ending up as something closer to, say, The
Empty Man than The Silence of the Lambs, Suspect Zero while
well intentioned seems to self-terminate as it nears inconclusion.
While an interesting footnote in the director’s career with
an otherwise solid cast that’s never boring, it is indeed kind of sad to see
such a promising wholly original filmmaker’s career end up here. Nevertheless, the Kino Lorber disc release is
solid for Merhige fans keen on eating up everything on his plate. Fingers crossed this means Kino will work out
a deal to release both Begotten and Shadow of the Vampire due
proper. In any case, maybe the weirdest
major Hollywood film of the 2000s nobody saw let alone talked about, a shame
considering it is from one of the most talked about directors of the new
millennia.
--Andrew Kotwicki
