Who came first: Christopher Abbott or Kit Harrington? They were born the same year (Abbott is slightly older) and look as if they were separated at birth, but were born in different countries. Harrington’s IMDb credits starts in 2011 with Game of Thrones, and nothing subsequent to that entry seems noteworthy. Abbott’s credits start earlier at 2009 and are more recognizable even if his role in the movie is difficult to place, which generally is a testament to good acting if he is such a chameleon that he can disappear into a role. Unfortunately I’m beginning to associate Abbott with bad movies: Tyrel, It Comes at Night, and most recently Piercing.
Mia Wasikowska has landed roles with legendary directors such as Guillermo del Toro, David Cronenberg, Chan-wook Park, Tim Burton, Edward Zwick and Jim Jarmusch so at least if she is in a movie, it usually means that the film will have something going for it, but Piercing is the exception to the rule. Should I start worrying about Wasikowska? Is it the beginning of the end? Or is it the reverse of the broken clock rule, and she has to be wrong about a project two times so Piercing is her first?
I was drawn to Piercing because of the subject matter, and it looked visually distinctive. I almost saw it in theaters, but because it is an artsy fartsy movie playing in a small nonprofit theater, the showings were infrequent, and my schedule was uncooperative, I missed it. Thank God! At least I just wasted my time, eighty-one minutes that felt exponentially longer than its actual running time, not my money.
Apparently Piercing is an adaptation of a Japanese novel set in Tokyo written during the early nineties, which may partially explain why the film does not work. The film had to translate the source material to a different time period or timelessness, region, language, race, culture…I could go on. Something had to get lost in the mix. When I saw the film, I didn’t know any of this information, but if you saw Takashi Miike’s Audition, it was also based on a novel with the same author, Ryu Murakami. I loved and was completely taken aback by Audition, and if Piercing was aiming for the same reaction, it failed utterly and completely. Miike should rescue Piercing, see if he can get the rights and remake the film the way that the author probably intended.
Piercing is about a family man who decides to hire a sex worker to kill so he can redirect his aberrant thoughts to what he thinks is a more appropriate target, but gets more than he expected. The opening feels as if you are being set up for a period piece, but it is deliberately stylized to seem as if it could be set in the past, but just modern enough that it could be set in the present. The city scape feels like a soundstage or a diorama, and the filming location seems to be a deliberate mystery. It shortly becomes obvious that our family man is an unreliable character so his perspective cannot be trusted as objective truth, but you know that things are bad when you are actually hoping that the film pulls a Dallas, and everything is a dream. Eighteen minutes into the film, it switches to her perspective, and folks, things don’t improve by much on the other side. It commits the almost criminal offense of being redundant in such a short film. There has to be a better way of exclusively showing different perspectives without feeling redundant. Television shows like This Is Us manage it, but this film that I’m sure that they thought was so avant garde and daring could not make it work.
Action cannot be a substitute for interesting characters or character development. Maybe it makes for a challenging acting exercise for the people within the film, but it bored this viewer. Action isn’t just car chases or CGI. It is characters doing things that we have no idea whether or not it is in character so we have no investment in the narrative or the fate of these characters. Piercing is just an example of upping the ante or being pointlessly provocative. The reason that Audition works is because the shift is seismic. I remember when I started that movie, I briefly ejected the DVD to make sure that I didn’t get the wrong disc because the beginning did not match my expectation of what a movie should look like if it is considered one of the most disturbing movies of all time. Piercing has a lot of shifts, but they seem predictable and dumb.
If a character can hit eject, and the average person, even a killer in training, would press the button, but the character does not, am I supposed to buy that this movie is really a love story about two deranged people finding each other? If Piercing is supposed to be a twisted love story, then I’m super mad because it is false advertising. I never wanted a love story. I wanted a turn the tables movie. Also if it is a love story, it is far from being the most daring or memorable love story between two psychos because at least if Piercing delivered by giving me something that I did not know that I wanted, I would at least have been intrigued and challenged, not jerked around. Piercing’s filmmakers can go watch True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Bonnie and Clyde, Pedro Almodovar’s Matador, you shallow, lame, unimaginative hacks! The fact that she is willing to theoretically explore his monstrous desires without judgment, and his tolerance of her unpredictable behavior does not sell me on the idea that they belong together. It is more like a Venn diagram of madness. Correlation does not equal causation.
If I had to choose the best part of Piercing, it was when the wife puts the baby on the phone, and the family man is not thrilled. Stop putting children on phones if they can’t talk! It is torture for the other side. Now pardon me while I talk to my cat on the phone.
Piercing never learned that disturbing imagery cannot be equated with a solid movie. It committed the one cardinal sin that any movie can make. I did not care what happened onscreen while the movie was unfolding, and once it was over, it began to rapidly evaporate. So many shocking things and none of them worth remembering. If you read this review and still watch this movie, are you also one of those people who just enjoy paying more for car insurance? Only write me if you enjoyed it because I’m genuinely curious if this film actually had any redeeming value for a viewer not involved in the film.