Spinning Man (2018)

(In French, On TV, April 2022) It’s perfectly acceptable to watch mediocre films if the cast is interesting, and in Spinning Man’s favour, you do get Guy Pearce and Pierce Brosnan sparring as (respectively) a man suspected of murder and a slightly-too-dogged detective. On the distaff side, you have both an evergreen favourite in Minnie Driver and a rising star in Alexandra Shipp. But casting may be the film’s best and sole asset, because the rest of the story (not very well adapted from a novel) is designed for frustration, but then goes on to compound its foundational issue with even more unforced problems. The situation, as we understand it, is that our protagonist (Pearce) is a philandering husband whose fondness for young women ideally fits his job as a philosophy teacher, with a resumé that consequently includes a suspicious transfer from one school to another. When an ex-student of his goes missing, the detective has plenty of clues to suggest he’s involved. But here’s the thing: Spinning Man isn’t really interested in a conventional murder mystery. It’s one of those films more interested in meditations about memory, guilt, truth and perception. It dumps a load of red herrings on the viewer, pulls the rug of conventional murder mysteries from under them, and makes a little victory dance of having fooled everyone. It’s one of those movies-as-elaborate-game things, which only works if the viewer is interested in playing. I’m sure someone, somewhere, gets where the film was going with its multiple false leads, denial of a crime and imaginary sequences – probably the novelist, maybe the screenwriter, not necessarily the director. By the end of it, Spinning Man is more likely to feel tedious than anything else—OK, so you lay out the groundwork for a murder mystery, but then proudly claim to not care about it? Fine, here’s me claiming that I don’t care about the results either. I’m not completely disappointed in the film – there’s a nice slightly-gloomy small-town college atmosphere, and the four main actors are well worth watching in their own way. But while I see Spinning Man make elaborate pretentious gestures, I’m not really invested enough to make even the slightest effort to go beyond a surface level read of the film, where it intentionally fails at satisfaction.