Movie review: Residue

[kestrell]

Residue (Written and directed by Rusty Nixon, 2017)
This film combines two of my narrative fetishes, horror noir and a supernatural book, which is what persuaded me to watch it in the first place, but it turned out to be a surprisingly likeable movie.
It's not an instant classic, but it might well turn out to be a cult classic.

Set in a seedy futuristic city, James Clayton plays Luke, a really, really, down on his luck private eye working for crime boss Mr. Fairweather played by the maniacal Matt Frewer). Luke is hoping for a big job that will allow him to provide a better life for his estranged daughter, so when Fairweather offers him a lot of money to deliver a mysterious briefcase, Luke takes the job, and instantly hitmen show up trying to kill him. When Luke opens the briefcase and finds a creepy book, things become even more desperate as he attempts to solve the mystery of the book before the hitmen succeed in killing him.

This low budget indie film does a lot with a little. The storyline is solid, and becomes increasingly complex as Luke progresses through the book and spins off an increasing number of timelines. When Luke's estranged daughter shows up, Luke's desperation increases as he tries to keep her safe from both the hitmen and Luke's own personal demons.

I found the multiple timeline aspect of this film really interesting, and the relationship between Luke and his nearly grownup daughter was endearingly awkward. (I realize this is a slight spoiler, but I need to mention that this film has one of the best daughter coming out to dad scenes *ever*.)

The pacing of the film is good, with tension being relieved by occasional darkly humorous moments. One of the things I look for in a film is a director who trusts his audience to pick up the story without having everything explained, and Residue offers a satisfying amount of ambiguity to provide for lively conversation after the movie ends.

Note: We watched this movie on Netflix, but Netflix also has a 3-part pilot titled Residue (Dir. Alex Garcia Lopez, 2015).

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Ooooh, that sounds intriguing.

Any notions on the gore factor?

[kestrell]

I would give this a gore rating of 2 out of 5 on the gore scale. There some Lovecraftian variety of ick--there is some tentacular horror--and there's a funny talking headless corpse which gets a minute or so of screen time, and there's also a spooky bloody girl who pops up a few times and one zombie. There's also some crime-related violence. To tell the truth, I think the evil book which oozes goo is the grossest thing in the movie.