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Jon Amiel (Britain, 1948) after the TV
series The Singing Detective (1986) directed two comedies:
Queen of Hearts (1989) and
Tune in Tomorrow (1990), the latter based on
Mario Vargas Llosa's novel
La Tia Julia y el Escribidor (1977).
The historical movie Sommersby (1993) is a loose remake of Daniel Vigne's Le Retour de Martin Guerre (1982).
Amiel's best film is by far the psychological thriller Copycat (1995),
one of the best films about serial killers, coincidentally released the same
year as David Fincher's Seven, and superior to the quasi-biopic
Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Helen (Sigourney Weaver) is a psychologist who specializes in serial killers. She gives a lecture
at a university and sees a killer in the audience smiling and gesturing at her.
The man is supposed to be in prison and she ignores it as an hallucination.
When a police officer escorts her to the man's bathroom because
the woman's bathroom is out of order, the young man attacks her, hanging her
with a cable, and then shoots the cop who comes to check on her.
Another cop captures the killer, Daryll Lee, who obviously has escaped from prison.
Helen survives but lives traumatized, incapable of leaving her apartment, where she lives with her gay assistant Andy. Her social life is now limited to computer chat rooms.
Meanwhile, detectives Mary Jane (Holly Hunter) and her partner Reuben are
investigating two murders who seems to have been committed by the same person.
Helen calls them repeatedly to warn them that a serial killer is on the loose
but her calls are treated like the calls of a psycho until Mary Jane traces
the calls and finds out that the caller is the famous serial killer expert.
Mary Jane and Reuben visit Helen and realize that she has already figured out
the psychology of the killer. We see that someone is watching Helen from
a nearby apartment.
We then see the serial killer: a shy young man, Peter, who lives with a bed-ridden mother and has built a creepy laboratory in the basement. We see that he has captured a young woman and tied her down on his bed as if he's goong to perform surgery on her. She is found the following day naked near a sign "No dumping" which Helen recognizes as the setting used by a famous serial killer.
This third murder doesn't follow the expected pattern though.
Helen is reluctant to keep working on the case, still fearful of becoming
a victim herself.
The killer is playing a game with Helen, sending her videos that foretell his murders.
Mary Jane and Reuben assign a cop to guard her apartment.
A fourth woman is shot dead in her car. Helen realizes that this time the
killer imitated another serial killer. Helen predicts exactly what Mary Jane
and Reuben find on the scene. Helen is now certain that the killer is a copycat
who prides himself in replicating the style of all the famous serial killers.
This time the killer also left a message that implies that he's going to attack Helen. In fact, the killer creates a distraction, eludes the guard, enters the
apartment and terrorizes Helen, who is psychologically unable to flee.
Helen realizes that the killer is following the sequence of serial killer of her presentation at the university.
At night Helen realizes that her bed is infested with ants and finds a finger in her bed with a copy of her book about serial killer Daryll Lee signed by him.
They call Daryll Lee who admits that he sent her the book and gives them an
important clue to capture the killer in Chinatown in return for Helen to send
him one of her pantyhoses.
When the cops round up Chinese suspects, one of them steals a gun and kills Reuben and Mary Jane cannot save him. Mary Jane's boss wants her to stop any contact
with Helen, but Mary Jane disobeys and continues the investigation with Helen's help.
Helen knows that, following the sequence, the next killing will involve a man.
The killer is still playing with Helen: he leaves a message on her answering
machine that is a recording of her lecture at the university.
The man who gets killed is Helen's gay assistant.
Helen predicts that the next killing will be a threesome.
Based on Helen's prediction of what the killer will do, the police are able
to track him down: they raid Peter's home, find Peter's mom dead, and Peter's
basement explodes.
Peter kidnaps Helen and leaves a video message for Mary Jane challenging her
to find out where Peter will kill Helen.
Mary Jane guesses that it's the bathroom where Helen was almost killed by
Daryll Lee. In fact, that's where Peter has killed a cop and is hanging
Helen, replicating the scene of the beginning.
Helen is holding the rope with her hands so as not to suffocate.
When Peter begins to torture her, Helen spits on him, infuriating him.
Mary Jane arrives but Peter outsmarts her and shoots her.
Helen is still holding the rope with her hands but now
Helen lets go to die. Peter saves her by cutting the rope because his plan is to torture her slowly to death, but this allows Helen to grab a shard of glass
and stab Peter in a leg. Helen can now run away. She climbs to the roof
despite her agoraphobia.
Peter is about to kill her when Mary Jane appears (obviously not dead as we
thought) and kills him, shooting him repeatedly.
In the last scene Daryll Lee is writing a letter to another killer, asking him to kill Helen and advising him to keep it simple, so we realize that
Daryll Lee was indeed the one who motivated Peter to target Helen.
And we realize that the happy ending is not truly happy: there is still someone
out to kill Helen.
The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997) is a silly comedy adapted from
Robert Farrar's 1997 novel "Watch That Man".
Entrapment (1999), written by Ronald Bass,
the sci-fi movie The Core (2003),
written by Cooper Layne and John Rogers,
and the biopic
Creation (2009) were increasingly mediocre.
(Copyright © 2024 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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