Miles of Bad Road: Jennifer Lynch’s “Surveillance”

Let’s start with Bennett (Kent Harper), the traumatized cop with his poor partner Conrad’s blood still dried to his face. In truth, he and Conrad (French Stewart, dropping edgy f-bombs and sporting a career-revivalist goatee) are marauding nihilists, apparently representative of cops everywhere (“They’re all corrupt” is insightfully observed at one point) who thrill to the pointless theft and torture of innocent motorists. How about Bobbi (zonk-eyed Pell James), the leggy young thing? She’s no better, an amoral cokehead who exults in wild hedonism, mocks all that’s good and sacred in the world, and robs from fresh, frothy-mouthed corpses. First shown drunkenly firing pistols at off-road targets while barking out America’s most notorious murderers—“The Manson family” Bam! Bam! “John Wayne Gacy” Bam! Bam!—Bennett and Conrad blithely shoot out the tires of two passing cars and go all Guantanamo on the gargoyled occupants. In car #1, Bobbi’s forced to talk dirty while her meat slab of a boyfriend has to watch; and outside of car #2, Conrad kisses (“You smell good”) and dry humps a father at gunpoint while Stephanie and family cower in fear, all for a forced dark-comedic laugh. At which point I suppose we’re ready for the slaughter. Building suspense out of audience exhaustion, Lynch makes us anticipate the horror at the end of the road, dread combating wish fulfillment as shrouded killers orchestrate an orgiastic pile-up of cars and bodies. Is death easier to stomach when it claims bad cops, wastoid boyfriends, and other human garbage? Since such misery reads not as grim truth but as a broad articulation of adolescent misanthropy, there’s no moral satisfaction in “Surveillance”—just 97 minutes of unrelenting unpleasantness.

Such an obvious, unleavened take on humanity bears little resemblance to Papa Lynch’s infinitely refracted art, despite Jennifer’s borrowing freely from the master’s iconography—the desert highway as fucked-up funhouse, the high-gloss fetishization of filth, the bottle-top teetering between arch and inept, the presences of Bill Pullman, Julia Ormond. Lynch tries to give her stock characters and genre cliches an ironic snap, but only her game leads give any life to the material. Pullman in particular utilizes every crease and leathery pouch on his face to queerly flinch, stiffly swivel, or roll a wandering tongue against his teeth, pushing every silly line a little closer to perversity. A final twist has the potential to surprise, and perhaps “Surveillance” functions just fine as this year’s freaky mindfuck. Lynch proves adept at preserving plausibility without giving too much away, and the film inspires a nice afterglow of retrospective puzzlement. But even upended and reoriented the film has the same goth-stylish pose. My, what monsters we humans are; all the better to laugh darkly as our heads splatter, the devil has his day, and the endless, pointless road beckons.

[An indieWIRE review from Reverse Shot.]

[Eric Hynes is a Reverse Shot staff