VILLANELLE (review)

Review by Tony Pacitti

The low-budget, indie thriller Villanelle starts off as misleadingly standard stuff—an ex-big city detective is “exiled” to a sleepy town and all signs point towards a crime that the locals aren’t equipped to deal with.

How filmmaker Rick Leprade shakes that formula up is by introducing a supernatural element that is more than just a clever genre mash-up.

Detective Burke (Rich Tretheway) is a disgraced Boston cop “reassigned” to a tiny Rhode Island town where he spends his days coping with “hot leads” on missing kayaks by downing Pepto and whiskey. He’s a down on his luck cop in the classic noir mold–disheveled, drunk and prone to voice overs.

The town itself is a little disheveled and drunk, a summer hot spot deep into its off season slump, the kind of place with little to do besides getting a drink at the local bar and waiting out the winter.

This all gets turned inside out when femme fatale Dawn (Gillian Williams) shows up at Burke’s door in the middle of the night after having been raped and left for dead.

Her survival is the key to linking a string of not-so unrelated deaths and together the two of them work towards finding the town’s poetry obsessed killer.

Here’s where that supernatural element comes into play and without spoiling what it is let me assure you that Laprade has done something fresh with it.

We’ve seen no shortage of this particular creature over the last decade at the movies, but here it’s given a unique spin. A well-known hunter has now become the hunted, and as a jaded movie-goer it was refreshing to see this horror trope made helpless and vulnerable in a way that gets right to the core of what makes it so scary in the first place.

Visually the film is well crafted, both in its depictions of its sleepy, off-season setting and its sinister crime scenes. Most interesting of all are Dawn’s dreams, vivid sequences of unreality painted in red and gold that break from the rest of the film’s deliberate coldness, those blue-greys that seem to dominate the coastal landscape after the autumn leaves have fallen and winter death has crept in. 

What Laprade and his cast and crew have created is a brisk New England noir, perfectly balanced with that darkness and mystery that we’re so fond of thinking lurks just beneath all of our quaint, coastal towns.

This is the land of Lovecraft and witches after all, and Villanelle is a welcome addition to New England’s macabre tradition.