The Man in the Orange Jacket

London Film Festival 2014. BFI South Bank, 14/10/2014
Billed as the first ever Latvian horror film, Aik Karapetian's feature is like a rollercoaster in that it keeps the adrenaline flowing, but at the end of the ride we haven't really gone anywhere. The main protagonist spends several days living the good life in the house of a couple he has murdered. The house owner is a large employer of dock workers who has just retrenched hundreds of his employees, a detail which seems to be there to provide a justification for his murder. What follows reflects the confused state of mind of the murderer as another orange-jacketed killer seems to be after him. While we wait for a final showdown that doesn't seem to come (or does it?) he eats out at an expensive restaurant, goes shopping, imagines intruders, meets an associate of the house owner, and orders prostitutes to entertain him.

The large mansion in which the film is mostly set almost begs for the cold and detached Haneke-like cinematography that we get, but unlike Haneke, Karapetian doesn't resist shocking the audience by ratcheting up the tension and getting in closer when the violence finally occurs. The film crosses a line at a couple of points, with suggestions of necrophilia that are really superfluous to the story and seem to be there for shock value (and if so, why the repetition?). There is a vagueness at the heart of the film, beginning with an ambiguity about the identity of the main protagonist, and much of the action that subsequently turns out to be imagined. It is almost as if Karapetian isn't sure of which way to take the story and therefore filmed and included every option under the guise of dream sequences or the murderer's disturbed state of mind. In the end, as with the rollercoaster, much adrenaline is released but ultimately we are no further along - in our understanding of what we have just seen. This lack of conviction almost seems to make the point that all the awful things we see are a product of the imagination anyway, so none of it matters and we shouldn't get worked up about it, surely defeating the whole point of making this type of film.

There is plenty of style and no shortage of technical skill demonstrated in this film, but it may have worked better as an atmospheric short. Stretched out to a feature (albeit a short one), its shortcomings are all too apparent.