Tright here’s a throb of claustrophobic panic and despair on this film; one thing like one thing any of us may really feel whereas at a contemporary artwork exhibition and for an extended, lengthy second unable to seek out the exit. Perhaps the film itself aspires to the cool, affectless chill of an unimaginably costly piece of up to date artwork.
Documentary-maker Vasilis Katsoupis makes his fiction characteristic debut right here , engaged on the script with British screenwriter Ben Hopkins. Willem Dafoe stars, as athletic and ascetic as ever, taking part in Nemo, an artwork thief who’s breaking into an ultra-luxurious Manhattan house belonging to an art-collector plutocrat, stuffed with all his trendy items. (There’s a point out of this man being away in Kazakhstan and one in all his items is a crimson canvas with a “Z” on it.) New York Metropolis is seen from inventory footage and in projections past the plate glass, and actually this apparent studio-based unreality shouldn’t be inappropriate.
Dafoe’s thief is evidently working with an confederate, involved by way of a walkie-talkie, who guides him into the property, giving him tense directions about safety codes, and so forth. He’s after some Egon Schiele work, however the self-portrait they wished isn’t the place they thought it will be; the thief begins wanting round for it and it’s maybe this unplanned route variation which triggers a catastrophic safety lockdown. The metal doorways clang shut: the temperature management goes haywire.
Defoe’s confederate abandons him and ignores his determined yells into the walkie-talkie and now the thief is totally alone: a postmodern Robinson Crusoe (or perhaps Robert Maitland from JG Ballard’s Concrete Island) stranded in a world whose high-end luxurious and all its artwork items (canvases and sculptures and video artwork installations ceaselessly and pointlessly taking part in right into a particular room) are immediately remodeled into nonsense. (Or is it that their nonsense is now brutally, tactlessly revealed?) The thief has to scavenge what meals scraps are left over within the fridge however he has to sip water from the timed-irrigation pipes for the vegetation. The rest room is backed up and the thief is diminished to defecating within the hidden concrete bunker for super-special artwork items. However as he slowly goes loopy, the thief begins to obsess over a cleaner referred to as Jasmine whom he can see with the still-working CCTV display screen – and begins to see how he can escape.
It is a movie which perhaps spins its wheels when it comes to a development of narrative or, certainly, concepts. And there may be the query of why the thief doesn’t have a smartphone on him; clearly he doesn’t use it at first to ensure he’s untraceable. However certainly he would have one, turned off at first, for emergencies?
Nicely, this movie is rarely uninteresting and Dafoe has a martyred depth and anchorite emaciation (I discovered myself considering of his position as Scorsese’s Christ.) Maybe the purpose is that super-rich artwork funding is already a sterile religious jail. Or maybe Katsoupis and Hopkins are suggesting one thing else: that whereas humanity decays and dies like Dafoe’s hermit thief, artwork carries on, persisting in its callous manner – and even affords a form of escape. It’s a unusual, enclosed expertise: Dafoe’s mastery of the display screen retains it significant.
