Thinly Veiled but Unmistakably Bad

Comments (0) By Aaron Hillis Thursday, Mar 14 2013

There's an unfortunate irony that Liberty Ross--spurned wife of Snow White and the Huntsman director/adulterer Rupert Sanders--co-stars as a scorned wife in a movie called Thinly Veiled. More disastrous is that she's not half the actress Kristen Stewart is. Not that anyone will notice, as the entire overacting ensemble of former Hootie & the Blowfish videographer Adolfo Doring's 2009 multi-threaded, NYC-set drama seems escaped from Tommy Wiseau's cult trainwreck The Room. Among the "thinly veiled" casualties is a disturbed young son, always glued to a low-rent slasher series on TV (which is also the only thing that shows on every television in the film's reality). Meanwhile, the onscreen actor who plays that killer convinces a cranky ex-colonel to be interviewed about military interrogations to make better torture porn--his redheaded assistant an uncanny Jessica Chastain lookalike. And her nimrod cousin runs an escort service but pretends to be a gallery curator, his website depicting his whores as "artists." (How exactly do johns figure that out?) Shot with Skinemax-grade production values and a curious tic in which even throwaway moments are cut together from too many angles, this ludicrous, overlong, pathetically conceived, instant festival rejection might just be sincere enough to rank among laughable drunk-crowd curios like Troll 2, Birdemic and, ye Gods, The Room.