Mathieu Amalric tries his hand at Georges Simenon in a cold 'n clammy THE BLUE ROOM

I'm only luke-warm to THE BLUE ROOM, which surprises me, considering how much I've enjoyed the work of Mathieu Amalric, especially as an actor (he both stars in and directs this movie) and also as a filmmaker (Le Stad de Wimbledon, The Screen Illusion). Not having read the novel by Georges Simenon on which the film is based, I'm going only via what I viewed on screen. This is, pretty much, a nicely formal, old-fashioned (right down to the size of the screen: 1.33:1), traditional (despite the nudity, including some full-frontal from both sexes), psychological murder-mystery non-thriller (Amalric appears to have deliberately drained away any possibilities of actual suspense, chills or thrills).

This last assessment is not necessarily a negative, for the director/actor (shown at right) seems intent on putting character (within the framework of the society at large) ahead of all the standard stuff we seem to want from our mysteries. But what we get from our characters, every last one of them, is gloomy and morose. These people are about as glum as characters come. Granted Amalric/Simenon may be indicting a society or class. But, really: If anything remotely pleasant happens here, you can be sure it will soon come back to bite you and the character in the ass.

The story is simplicity itself: a married man (Amalric, above, right) has an affair with a married woman (Stéphanie Cléau, above, left), which neither cuckolded spouse (Léa Drucker, below, plays the wronged wife) seems to know about (though both may suspect). Death, maybe murder, ensues, and the illusion of justice must be served -- even if justice itself may or may not have been done.

For all the attention to character on display, in the end we don't really learn that much about anyone -- except that these are very unhappy people. Style-wise, the movie is mostly a pleasure to view. Color (or often the lack of it) plays its part; both interior and exterior shots are well composed and lighted (cinematography, by Christophe Beaucarne, is top-notch); and the performances are all that the adaptation (by Amalric and Ms Cléau) allows.

Amalric and Cléau prove darkly passionate lovers (with love scenes,above and below, to match) in a relationship that seems to hark back more to school days than present-day, while the wonderful Ms Drucker (so fabulous in the under-seen The Man of My Life) does what she can with a role that's not allowed to budge.

Although the movie runs only 75 minutes, it seems rather longer, due to the low-key, unchanging, enervating atmosphere it conjures. Don't get me wrong: Amalric proves an extremely economical filmmaker in many ways, so this is an accomplishment of sorts. And some will find the movie exactly to their taste, I suspect. But what passes for subtlety in certain circles can look pretty heavy-handed to others of us.

The Blue Room, from Sundance Selects via IFC Films, opens theatrically today, Friday, October 3 -- for Yom Kippur! -- in New York City at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal. (The following Friday, October 10, it will open at Laemmle's Playhouse 7 and Town Center 5.)

Writer/director Elias' unsavory creep-fest GUT pulls out the stops--with odd subtlety

What happens to boys who watch too many sleazy horror films too often? A possible scenario -- the boys turn into really strange men -- is offered by the one-word filmmaker, Elias, whose first full-length feature as writer and director, the all too appropriately named GUT, opens this week. These naughty boys, two friends since school days named Tom and Dan, seem to have grown up almost in tandem and now work at the same office, even though Tom has managed to marry and have a sweet little daughter during his off hours. Gut (yes, that title is used as a verb, rather than a noun) has been invited to 20 different film festivals over the past year (mostly, as you might imagine, in the horror and fright categories), and I think it safe to say that, once seen, it will not be easily forgotten.

The movie begins with a super-violent few moments -- blood splattering all over the place -- as something or someone is done in. Yet even here, in the midst of such carnage, whether by design or a very low budget (most likely both), we see very little, really. Elias (shown at left, giving us quite the stare) keeps his frame tight and his editing (done by himself) smart and fast, so that much of the movie and its horror is suggested first, then heightened by further suggestion and repetition. The result is one of the most unsavory little movies I have encountered in years. Gut is so unsavory that I didn't want to keep watching, but it is so well handled -- the writing, directing, acting, editing and all the rest -- that I couldn't stop watching. Bummer.

From where does all this ugliness come? Well, try combining the idea of sexual arousal with snuff films. Then add two pretty and vulnerable young women and finally a lovely little child. Clearly, Elias enjoys being transgressive; just as clearly, he enjoys doing it with some style and subtlety. The movie hinges in good part on the two actors who play the leads. (The women are mostly decorative and used as ploys, though their performances--especially Sarah Schoofs, as Tom's wife, shown bottom, left -- are quite good). In the role of Tom, the "family" man, Jason Vail (shown at right and below) is alternately nerdy and no-good. He has an odd face that can look quite handsome at times and otherwise utterly ordinary. Spending a good deal of the film looking pre-occupied (and for good reason), he only seems to come fully alive as he grows aroused watching the awful snuff stuff (below).

Nudity is used throughout the film, sparingly but precisely, as both men make love (no, not to each other) or shower or just wander the bedroom. It is used equally precisely on the snuff discs they watch, so that life and "art" mirror each other in nasty fashion.

The nerdier of the two men, Dan -- a marvelously creepy and sad performance from Nicholas Wilder -- seems torn between his need for Tom (the homo-eroticism is never stated but it's unmissable) and his desire for the sexy and nicely mature waitress in the luncheonette near the office that the two men frequent with regularity. In his single sex scene, Wilder, too, projects an odd distance between himself and his sexual partner. You can feel him feeling the pull of that video, even as he is satisfying his woman.

Elias manages the same precision and subtlety with the material we see on the video discs. He shows us enough to make us wince and look away but no more. His editing is crisp, clear and to the point. And while he doesn't hold back in the plot department (this happens and then this and then that), neither does he tie everything up neatly. Where have these discs come from, and why? At the end we still do not know for certain what has actually happened. Much is suggested; little is confirmed.

Some viewers will rail at this elusiveness. I found it disarming and unsettling. Gut is an ugly movie. I didn't "like" it. But I surely am impressed. The film -- self-distributed, unrated and running 90 minutes -- opens in New York City this Friday at the Cinema Village and is available beginning today on VOD via iTunes, CinemaNow, Vudu, Amazon Instant Video, Xbox, PS3 and YouTube.

BOY WONDER, Michael Morrissey's mixed bag, is available now via VOD and DVD

Responsibility for the interesting but flawed film BOY WONDER most definitely lies with its writer/director/
producer Michael Morrissey. In this, his first foray into writing and directing (he's acted as producer on a number of house-and/or-home-related TV series), Morrissey (shown below) cleverly conflates a few different genres, from neo-noir and vigilante thriller to women-in-jeopardy and the more recent, would-be super-hero film. His questionable "hero," Sean Donovan, long ago saw his mother murdered during a car-jacking gone wrong, and he's never forgiven the murderer -- nor himself. But hey, he was only a kid at the time.

Older now (he appears to be one of those typical "elderly" high school students we so often see in the movies), Sean (played by Caleb Steinmeyer, below) is determined to protect abused women everywhere (in the Brooklyn area, at least), and so here he is saving the ladies and killing the guys. His modus operandi is a bit strange, however: He first interferes, allows himself to be beaten up, and then pulls knife or gun and gets down to the real work at hand. From a psychological standpoint of guilt and self-punishment, this makes some sense, and if the first part of the film were not so full of questionable moments, it would be easier to go along with it all. But little (and not so) things begin to rankle.

First there's the quite unbelievable conversation that Detective Ames (Zulay Henao, below, right) has with an arch villain named Larry Childs (James Russo) -- right in the middle of a courtroom. Later Ames finds Sean alone in the police station at night and appears to accept everything he says at face value. And, boy, is Sean ever privy to an awful lot of woman/child abuse. Literally everywhere he looks, something bad is going on. Plus, some of the villains seem a bit more attuned to reality than is Sean: "You didn't save her; you made it worse," one of them tells the kid. Most damaging of all is the fact that we have a hero who's a one-note whack job, and would, in any real world, long ago have been committed to a hospital.

But then small parcels of further information get dropped in our laps, and as we learn more about the situation, it deepens and begins to interest us. Sean's dad, for instance, is not (or at least was not always) the fine, loving father we initially see. And what's with that odd chemical compound the kid's been looking up on the internet? Coincidences abound, and soon it begins to look like everything is connected. The ending moves from shocking to delicious to ironic and darkly funny.

Should you stick things out, you'll probably be glad you did, for that finale is indeed crackerjack. If you give up halfway along, however, no one would blame you, for the movie, finally, falls somewhere between the near-rave, three-and-one-half stars that Roger Ebert gave it, and the deadly pan that The New York Times reviewer Jeannette Catsoulis handed out.

Boy Wonder, from Inception Media Group, hit the streets this past November 8 on DVD, and has been available via VOD since late October. Further good news: Netflix starts renting it out this Tuesday, November 22.

On-Demand: DON'T LOOK BACK--de Van's diabolical use of Marceau & Bellucci

Back in 2002, a filmmaker named Marina de Van appeared to burst upon us with an odd and creepy movie called In My Skin, devoted to the story of a young woman with deep psychological problems who cuts herself. Yet Ms de Van, no beginner in the least, had been working with Ozon for some time as both actress and writer, as well as doing her own films, mostly shorts, since 1993. Approaching 40, this writer/director should have hit the big time with her newest movie DON'T LOOK BACK (Ne te retourne pas), considering that it's a genre-jumper that succeeds in each of its several genres -- thriller, sci-fi, psychological tale -- and also stars two major European actresses, Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci, both working at or near the top of their form.

Perhaps Ms de Van (shown at left) has bitten off more than today's dumbed-down audiences care to chew, because the movie has gone straight to On-Demand and will probably appear on DVD eventually -- in both of which venues it should find a small but devoted following who don't mind engaging in intelligent puzzlement grounded by a firm understanding of the psychology of the abandoned. Although the movie is one of those, during which, for a full half to two-thirds, you may  be muttering, "WTF is going on here?", I think you will not for a moment be tempted to stop watching.  So well set-up is the premise and follow-through, and so expertly does Ms de Van create her very odd and disturbing scenario (a woman's entire life -- including her apartment, husband, children and even her own image -- begins to change into something else), you'll want to stick around, if only to discover to which genre the movie actually belongs.

Is the writer/wife/mother played by Ms Marceau (above) being somehow "gaslighted," and if so, by whom?  Or is she truly going mad -- or into Alzheimer's?  And yet so real and befuddling are the changes around her -- the placement of a table, the color of one's eyes -- that "reality" is something the viewer begins to question as fervently as does our heroine.

Ms Bellucci, for her part, does a very good job of being mysterious. Of late I have found this actress less riveting than in former days when she seemed to house considerable emotion, as well as the ability to demonstrate it.  Yet, here, in a role that calls for hesitance and quiet discovery, she seems as commanding as ever (every bit as beautiful, too).

The supporting cast is well-chosen and delivers what's necessary (sometimes playing dual roles).  Especially authoritative is Brigitte Catillon (above, left) as an oddly distant "mom," while Andrea Di Stefano (atop Bellucci, below) entices, doubling as one of the hubbies and later as a very hunky waiter.

Don't Look Back (not to be confused with that earlier Bob Dylan movie) is available On-Demand all summer, through September 23, via IFC Films' Festival Direct program.  Click here for instructions on how to get it.