To
be a good music critic, you can’t simply rely on review copies. Eventually, you
need to hear the music live. Andrew Deeley understands this perfectly well, but
for eight months he has remained homebound due to the severe post-traumatic
stress resulting from a violent physical assault. However, he will have to
venture outside to have any chance of finding a missing neighbor in Sean
Spencer’s Panic (trailer here), which releases
today on VOD.
For
weeks, Deeley has been spying on Kem, a pretty Asian woman in the apartment building
facing his, through binoculars. It is a little creepy, but he is enormously
sad. Arguably, his internet hook-up with Amy might be a positive sign, but
before she leaves, she observes someone attacking Kem. Of course, she refuses
to talk to the police, for reasons one can easily guess, leaving the agitated
Deeley to conclude he will have to find her himself.
Deeley
will actually start trudging the streets of London again, but each
confrontation will more likely lead to a panic attack than physical violence.
Nevertheless, he manages to blunder across a dangerous human trafficking operation.
Even if he finds Kem, it is doubtful he has the wherewithal to save her, but
Amy is made of sterner stuff. Eventually, she helps the guilt-tripping music
journalist, despite her better judgment.
Deeley
might be the most pitiable obsessive peeping tom thriller-protag maybe ever,
but he is always acutely human. You can feel the palpable sense of danger
whenever he merely passes a bad guy on the sidewalk. That is how it works in
real life when average people suddenly confront the criminal element. The decidedly
damaged and unheroic Deeley acts as a corrective to just about every cinematic
everyman amateur sleuth who came before him. Even Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly
are unrealistically cool and collected in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, an obvious touchstone film for Spencer (Thelma Ritter would be much truer to
life).
As
Deeley, David Gyasi looks like the personification of a nervous breakdown. It
is a tense, grueling, uncompromisingly neurotic performance, but somehow Gyasi
maintains the quietly spectacular anxiety attack throughout the film. Indeed,
he carries the picture, since he is on-screen nearly every second. However, the
more forceful nature of Pippa Nixon’s Amy counterbalances him quite effectively
and Yennis Cheung is even more hauntingly desperate and vulnerable as Kem, who
really is in a great deal of trouble.
