Surveillance   Starring: Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond E1 Entertainment RRP: £15.99 SOF51222 Certificate: 18 Available 29 June 2009

It’s been a hell of a day on the highway. When Federal Officers Elizabeth Anderson and Sam Hallaway arrive at Captain Billing’s office, they have three sets of stories to figure out and a string of vicious murders to consider. One zealot cop, a strung out junkie and an eight year old girl all sit in testimony to the roadside rampage, but as the Feds begin to expose the fragile little details each witness conceals so carefully with a well practiced lie, they soon discover that uncovering ‘the truth’ can come at a very big cost...

Surveillance is a bit of a strange movie and not one that is easy to categorise (not that that's a bad thing). The title is a red herring and it's also not really, as the marketing people would have us believe, a thriller. Also, on reflection the movie makes absolutely no sense at all. Without spoiling anything... why would the murderer/s, who are clever and have been killing people all across the state, hang about? They don't want to get caught, so the best thing would have been to just kill the original couple they murder so that the authorities think they've skipped town.

When the movie opened I was a little worried that I was in for a bit of a boring time, as several of the actors seemed to be acting really badly. As this was the case for the majority of the cast (with the notable exception of the great Michael Ironside) I was a bit concerned that the director didn't really know what she was doing. However, in hindsight, it was quite a clever move - maybe too clever as the twist is pretty easy to work out way before the final reveal. But even though you can see it coming it's still a pretty powerful twist.

So what's the movie all about? Well, basically, two FBI cops are sent to a small town police station in order to help interview three individuals who were witness to a serial killer/s. There's a local cop (whose partner was killed in the incident), a young woman (whose boyfriend was murdered), and a little girl (who saw her mother, step-father and brother all killed).

The two adult witnesses are hiding things from the FBI officers. The cop and his dead partner spent their days killing time by drinking and terrifying any out of towners that drove through the area, while the young woman was in town with her boyfriend to pick up some drugs - the drug dealer dying of an overdose while they were there. The little girl hardly speaks, instead drawing pictures, which the FBI officers hope will reveal something about her family's killer/s. But as they get nearer to the truth, is anyone really ready for what will be uncovered?

Extras include Deleted Scenes (5 min, 17 sec - which is actually just one, very weird, deleted scene); Alternate Ending (6 min look at a different, and rather naff, conclusion to the film); and the movie's trailer.

One of the things that annoyed me about this DVD was the fact that there are a number of trailers at the start of the disc that you have to sit through in order to get to the main menu. You can't hit the main/root menu buttons either as this function has been disabled. This form of forced advertising is something I'd expect on a rental disc, but not on one I'd paid good money to watch. This is starting to become a growing trend with DVDs at the moment and is one aspect that really gets up my nose.

This is a well directed movie with some great performances. The suspense is kept up throughout and is certainly a film that will leave you thinking about it for quite some time to come. The end sequence is rather chilling - and almost lingers a little too long on the macabre twist.

8

NIck Smithson