Fashion designer Ford's second film, after 2009's
A Single Man, is a psychological thriller centred around a relationship between an artist (Amy Adams) and a writer (Jake Gyllenhaal) that fizzled out some time ago. As is the fashion in half the things you see now, it's told in two sections in reality where she unexpectedly gets a novel written by him in the post, separated by the story of the novel itself, which turns out to be a very dark imagining of the rape and murder of a man's wife and daughter by Texas hicks, leading to him setting out for revenge. As she reads it, she's increasingly consumed by what thought process led him to the story.
All well and good in principle, but whereas
A Single Man was a painfully honest dissection of someone's grief at loss, this is much more affected and it's a shame to see Ford revert to being so superficial. Adams doesn't have much to do apart from look distracted and troubled, while Gyllenhaal's story is a pretty bog-standard addition to the genre of having another go at backwoods psychos. You can see what he's trying to say about the emotional damage of separation, but it just doesn't come off.
5/10
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