Amy Kanaan Mann's thriller "Fields" was released in Ukraine

Premiere/cinema

In the boring serial killing movie Texas Killing Fields, director Amy Kanaan Mann plays the good daughter of her father, Michael Mann, who produced the film. The main director's discovery in the film is, perhaps, the appearance of the ghost of Laura Palmer, who, however, was liked dead by LYDIA MASLOVA more.

Based on a real criminal case, the script for "The Fields" fell into the hands of Michael Mann about ten years ago, and since then he has been trying to produce it, attracting various directors to the project. Then he decided not to complicate matters and offered it to his own daughter, who made her feature film debut back in 2000 with the independent drama Morning, and then gradually began filming TV series. Listening to her father, the hereditary director Mann went to the library, picked up a newspaper article in the archives about long-standing murders in southwest Texas (27 of them are still unsolved, and many of the corpses are not identified), looked at a map of the area with pasted-on photographs of the victims and began to diligently create an “atmosphere of the rural wilderness”, where, as the film’s characters pompously put it, “chaos reigns”, and God does not have enough hands to take even a little care of the local residents.

Even a teenage girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) understands that you shouldn’t expect attention and help from God, for whom the viewer is mainly asked to worry about as a potential victim, especially since the child is mostly left to his own devices; The mother systematically kicks her daughter out of the house to have fun with her boyfriends. In the mysterious twilight that shrouds “Fields,” you might not immediately notice that the girl’s mother is played by Sheryl Lee, who is so imprinted in the audience’s memory in the image of Laura Palmer, blue and wrapped in cellophane, that she has hardly had any worthwhile roles since then. were not offered, and the “Twinpeaks” fame did not have the best effect on the career of a not at all mediocre actress. In “Fields,” the dubious character Sheryl Lee again personifies the chaos reigning in the area and represents one of the small everyday incarnations of metaphysical infernal evil, which representatives of law enforcement agencies are trying to resist with varying degrees of success.

Both in content and especially in visual terms, Amy Kanaan Mann drifts from the realism of documented history towards mysticism. The cursed fields where the killer operates are something like a haunted house for the director, and by sending the young heroine in the gathering twilight through some kind of enchanted forest of dried trees, the author strives to create the feeling of a terrible fairy tale or a nightmare. However, Amy Kanaan Mann herself, although she has probably watched a lot of thrillers about maniacs and police films, seems to have never seen a single nightmare of her own; she has quite common and theoretical ideas about the nature of fear, and therefore cannot really scare anyone.

The forces of reason and order that come to grips with the dead fields are represented in the film by a visiting NYPD specialist (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who examines corpses, maps murder sites and wanders the neighborhood in search of clues along with the village detective ( Sam Worthington), who believes that any means are good in the fight against chaos, and interrogates local residents without undue delicacy, as well as his energetic ex-wife-investigator (Jessica Chastain). Some psychological tension arises between separated spouses who are forced to communicate at work, and there is also some friction between the Texas and New York colleagues, but the authors approach these storylines in the same superficial and careless manner as the friendship that has arisen between the New York a cop and a homeless Texas babe. How people who are still alive can hear each other amid the surrounding chaos, darkness and horror, agree on something and, if lucky, save someone - this worries director Mann as little as the fate of the anonymous dead. It seems more important for her to more strongly loosen up the sagging story with moody shots like a vulture ominously hovering in the sky over the fields or scraps of yellow police tape dangling sadly on the dried grass as a kind of symbol of the director’s lethargy, inability to cope with the material and carve out from it at least a spark of real suspense.

Newspaper "Kommersant Ukraine" No. 5 dated January 20, 2012, p. 4

Authors:

Lidia Maslova

Themes:

Movie

With grief across the fields