Review by Annie Riordan
Spoiler warning.
It’s so difficult to review a boring movie. It’s like trying to describe the difference between ecru and beige to a color blind albino.
Not that nothing interesting happens in Indiscretion. A ton of shit happens. There’s naked nude people having sex, and there’s blood and… more nudity-nakedness sex having and… more blood, and it’s all very bloody and… sexy, I guess. But still, by the time the sex is had and the blood is spilled, it just doesn’t seem like very much happened after all.
Liz and Patrick are an average 20something suburban couple, living in the spacious house that Liz’s mom left her and trying to ignore the fact that their relationship is holding together about as well as a shattered Ming vase wrapped in soggy Scotch tape. You see, Liz cheated on Patrick about two years earlier and Patrick still has all these trust issues that no amount of couples counseling has been able to repair. So, it seems like the perfect time to rent one of the vacant upstairs bedrooms out to some guy Liz met online. They sure could use the extra money and, short of buying her a six-pack of G-strings, slipping her some roofies and shoving her into a frat house on a Friday night, I can’t think of any better way to get the old suspicions brewing and the slut accusations flying fast and furious asap, can you?
Just to make matters worse, their car is in the shop so they have to send Liz’s annoyingly over-the-top chatty gay brother to pick up the couch-crasher – whose name turns out to be Alessandro – at the train station. On the long drive back to Liz and Patrick’s place, Gay Brother (I forgot his name already) cheerfully fills Alessandro in on the sordid details of Liz and Pat’s relationship, the untimely death of their mother and the long standing belief of New Englanders that everyone from the state of Massachusetts drives like an ignorant, entitled asshole (and even though I’ve only lived in New England for just over a year now, I tend to agree with this assessment more often than not).
Anyway…
As luck would have it, both Liz and Alessandro belong to that rarest of subspecies: people who hang out online a lot and are amazingly Smoking Hawt in person. Good thing they didn’t meet through OKCupid or the movie would have fallen flat on its face once it was revealed that Liz was a muffin-topped, duck-mouthed hoochie and Alessandro was really a douchcanoe named Steve who has mastered the art of sucking in his gut whilst snapping pics of himself in the bathroom mirror. But no: Alessandro is apparently on vacay from a Calvin Klein underwear shoot, and Liz’s tits are as perky as the day is long. Pat’s no slouch either, but he seems to be the only actor who did NOT agree to appear totally naked in this flick, so who cares?
Cut to the chase: Alessandro gets a load of Liz, blows a load in the shower and instantly starts plotting how best to get her away from Pat. Using his arsenal of knowledge gleefully gleaned from Gay Brother, Alessandro starts planting the seeds of doubt. And with Liz passed out cold on a double dose of Ambien, he also makes a very dedicated attempt to plant his own seed while Pat is otherwise occupied.
Liz also happens to belong to yet another rare subspecies: women who start manifesting symptoms of pregnancy – including full-on blow-your-groceries morning sickness – just four hours after conception, a full month before such symptoms normally kick in. But hey, we’ve only got twenty minutes of film left so let’s drop kick this bitch. Whose baby is it? Will Pat assume the worst? And what secrets might he be hiding from Liz? Tune in tomorrow for another episode of Indiscretion.
The film finally erupts into volcanic violence: eyes gouged out, ribcages crushed, throats slashed. But it takes a while to get going and has a couple of false starts before it finally gets to the red stuff. There’s far too many hiccups along the way, i.e. “I hit the bad guy and he’s down so let me go check on my wounded lover and uh-oh he slipped away while I wasn’t looking so now we have to creep through the house to find him” crap. Oh, and if you’re trying to run away from a killer, just fucking run. Unless you live in a cinderblock factory, don’t bother throwing stuff into his path to slow him down… especially when all you have at your disposal are fluffy couch cushions, ficus trees and Skittles. If you’re going to be that goddamned dumb, you just deserve to die.
Our story ends on a nice nihilistic note that I wasn’t expecting, and contains a neat little twist that I sorta saw coming but which still kinda worked, but the amount of “suspension of disbelief” required of me was far too much to ask. It wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It was just kind of…there. Patrick is an asshole, Liz couldn’t outwit a staple gun and Alessandro comes off more like a slightly creepy shoe salesman than a full blown serial killer. I didn’t give a fuck about any of them, and never for one moment did I feel any empathy, fear or concern. Watching Indiscretion is a bit like staring at an ecru wall for an hour and a half. Or is it off beige?