Surveillance begins in typically Lynchian fashion, with the FBI arriving in a small town beset by violent tragedy. We're a long way from Twin Peaks, however, and this is no David Lynch film. It's the much belated follow-up to Boxing Helena by the Peaks auteur's daughter, Jennifer Lynch, and while it begins as a routine thriller, by the end it has turned into one long sick joke.
The Feds in this case are Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond), taking over for local law enforcement in the investigation of a mass murder on a remote country road. The victims were passengers from three different vehicles: a family in a station wagon, two cops in a patrol car, and a couple of junkies fleeing from a drug deal gone awry. The survivors have all been assembled at the police station and are questioned separately, with Hallaway overseeing it all via surveillance cameras.
Each survivor has something to hide, so nobody is telling the whole truth - except perhaps for the little girl from the station wagon. Bobbi Prescott (Pell James) isn't interested in discussing the drug dealer who expired in her presence, while Officer Bennett (Kent Harper, who co-wrote the screenplay) would prefer not to disclose the full nature of his unorthodox law enforcement methods.
Only those of us in the audience are privy to the whole truth, as the survivors' stories unfold in flashbacks that contradict the testimony being given. At about the halfway point, the movie goes off the deep end - at least it seems that way until the big finale arrives and you realize, "No, now it's really going off the deep end." There's no way to discuss it in depth without revealing some huge spoilers, but if the whole point of Surveillance is to get its viewers thinking, "Dude, this is fucked up!" - well, mission accomplished. If there's a larger point, I'm not sure I want to know what it is.
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