Sundance 2012: Third Report

 Watching I Am Not A Hipster, (left) screening as part of the Next strand, I came to realise that neither am I. Although Destin Cretton's film was well-made and performed, I found it hard to relate to the central character, Brook Hyde (Dominic Bogart) an indie musician who returns to his San Diego roots after the death of his mother and the minor success of his debut album. Hyde is a talented but cynical multi-instrumentalist who finds himself sickened by the shallowness of the world that worships him, populated mainly by men with pencil moustaches, skinny jeans, woofly hair and black-rimmed Real-D nerd glasses. Hyde's plight isn't so sympathetic to anyone who already finds the hipster scene beyond parody, but for those open to Hyde's surprisingly unselfconsious music, of which there is a lot, this is a sweet, offbeat comedy that will surely find underground favour.


Cult status certainly beckons to Rodrigo Cortes's Red Lights, his follow-up to the claustrophobic man-in-a-box thriller Buried, which premiered in Sundance two years ago. There was laughter at the beginning – after a massively loud bang in an ostensibly haunted house, a character asks, “Did you hear that?” – and lots of WTFs at the end, but in between there was an interesting, if uneven supernatural detective story that would be much improved by a brutal re-edit of the second half.


The film stars Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy as a kind of a gender-swap Mulder and Scully, a pair of academic ghostbusters who the travel across the country investigating psychic phenomena. Margaret Matheson (Weaver) is a hard-nosed sceptic whose search for proof of a higher level of existence is fuelled by her devotion to her comatose son, while Tom Buckley (Murphy) is her brilliant if somewhat underachieving assistant. Usually, the two are in agreement on everything, but when reclusive, blind stage psychic Simon Silver (Robert De Niro) emerges from retirement, they start to fall out. Buckley wants to test Silver's abilities, ranging from spoon-bending to telepathy and... well, that's about it, but Matheson prefers to leave him well alone. Could it possibly be that that Silver is the real deal? A creepy campaign of harassment suggests that he might not be faking.


Daft it may be but when Red Lights finally gets off the blocks, the mid-section is entertaining and really quite smart. Weaver, who is so very good in Rampart, makes the most of a meaty role that allows her to be ballsy, professorial and motherly – all at the same time – while Murphy makes the transition from sidekick to hero with deceptive subtlety. What, then, prompted all the head-scratching? For some reason, Cortes blessed (or cursed) his verbose script with a number of lengthy speeches, especially Silver, who bores the pants off his audience with rambling monologues that cause one paying punter to grouse, “I didn't pay to hear Hamlet.” De Niro is very much comme-ci comme-ça as Silver, with a performance that is marginally better than usual (which isn't hard) and misleadingly suggests an Angel Heart-style reveal (which doesn't exactly help). But the real problem is the ending, or rather endings plural, which muddy a very clever twist. A few judicious snips, as those who saw the original cut of Southland Tales will attest, could make all the difference.