Deadline (2010)

Starring Brittany Murphy, Tammy Blanchard, Thora Birch, and Marc Blucas
Written and Directed by Sean McConnville
Review by Dan Coyle

Allow me for a bit, to indulge in a Harry Knowles digresson: on the 19th I was fighting off a terrible cold while trying to bang out a draft of this review. I went to bed, dug myself out of the snow the next day, and spent most of the 20th finishing up my Christmas purchases, and proceeded to feel myself getting pummeled senseless by the cold. As such, I missed the news until that evening, which was that Deadline star Brittany Murphy had died that morning of heart failure, at the age of thirty-two. This followed stories of erratic behavior that led to Murphy being fired from the film The Caller. The past few weeks has been filled with vultures picking at Murphy’s corpse, but what about this movie I have right here? The one whose DVD cover (already pulled from rental kiosks by Redbox) features Murphy’s corpse slumped over in a bathtub, an image made even more jaw-droppingly morbid by the circumstances of her death?...

I wish I could say Deadline features Murphy being bright, sunny, and cheerful, but for most of the film she looks flustered, upset, exasperated, and obsessed. Thankfully, that’s part of the plot. Sean McConnville, a former special effects technician, weaves the tale of Alice Evans (Murphy), a screenwriter recovering from a nervous breakdown. Against the wishes of her concerned girlfriend Rebecca (Blanchard), Alice sequesters herself in an abandoned house in the country to make sure she finishes her new script before the deadline.

At first, Alice finds the solitude comforting, but strange noises and mysterious happenings disturb her, leading her to a box filled with video tapes in the attic. It seems the previous occupants of the house were a married couple, David (Blucas) and Lucy (Birch). David had a cute, and sometimes annoying, habit of taping everything he and Lucy did. Alice finds herself watching the tapes during a break from writing.

David and Lucy are a typical young couple, and at first, they seem to be happy, and David’s videotaping is largely tolerated by Lucy. But soon David’s habit becomes an obsession, as he gets more and more paranoid that Lucy is having and affair and is going to leave him. Lucy tries to understand David’s behavior, tries to assure him all is well, but David’s behavior gets more controlling, to the point where Lucy tries to find a way out, with tragic consequences. At the same time, Alice finds herself haunted by what may be ghosts- so what happened to the both of them?

Murphy does a good job tracking Alice’s growing obsession, as she intently watches each tape and then scrambles all over the house looking for more of them. David and Lucy’s story isn’t very innovative or interesting, but the voyeur inside Alice can’t really resist, and besides, it offers a good distraction from her own personal problems. Blanchard, as Rebecca, has a pretty small role, but she does a fine job showing Rebecca as someone who truly loves Alice but doesn’t know how to reach her or make her feel whole again.

The story of David and Lucy, while it may be compelling for Alice, isn’t quite compelling for the viewer. Birch has been in a freefall since Ghost World- Lucy is just as emotionally distant and almost ethereal like pretty much every character the actress has played since she reached adulthood. It’s difficult to really work up much concern for her. Blucas is a similarly limited actor, but he’s at least able to give David some life, as his anger and paranoid curdle him into a monster.

So, for much of the running time, Deadline proceeds like a very typical haunted house movie. It’s fairly easy to figure out what will happen to David and Lucy, and it’s even easier to figure out what will happen to Alice when she views the last time. Oftentimes I grew frustrated with the familiar elements of the story, a not uncommon failing of a first time screenwriter.

As a director, however, McConnville’s very assured- there’s a very classical mood surrounding how he frames every shot of the empty house, building a fine sense of dread. Credit must also go to Ross Richardson’s cinematography, which distinguishes between the story told on the tapes and Alice’s own isolation skillfully.

By the time Deadline reached its conclusion, I was growing increasingly tired with the familiar scares and irritating plot holes that were piling up... but then the ending surprised me, and in a way that I thought I had guessed at, but no, McConnville’s script makes a U-turn that not only surprised me, but pretty much answered any issue I had with the story up to that point, spinning the viewers’ predjudices. Some may regard it as a cheat, but I thought it worked very well, and made it a movie worth recommending. Not a great film, but a fine example of its genre.

I suppose any future viewings of Deadline will be tarred by Murphy’s death; it’s hard not to read Alice’s troubles as reflective of the own problems the actress was allegedly having. But it shouldn’t take away from what’s a promising debut from McConnville, and a fine performance from Murphy. It’s a shame that there won’t be any more.