The
Motor Way Motel is just as cheap and seedy on either side of the two-way
mirrors the previous manager installed. It just depends on whether you are an active
participant or a voyeur. With respects to the lesbian dominatrix who often
stays in room #10, Ray will have to be the latter. However, peeping can get you
a troublesome eyeful in Tim Hunter’s Looking
Glass (trailer
here), which opens this Friday in select theaters.
For
reasons that never make any sense, Ray and his wife Maggie decide buying a roadside
motel will cure what ails their souls after the death of their young daughter
and the near collapse of their marriage due to his infidelity and her substance
abuse. Old Ben, the previous owner was eager to sell and once they completed
the handover, he made himself scarce. At least business is steady, especially
the more secluded room #10, which is the favorite of the dominatrix and a hooker-hiring
long-haul driver.
While
cleaning out the utility shed, Ray stumbles across Ben’s peeping tunnels and
finds them quite interesting, especially on nights the dominatrix books #10.
Needless to say, relations are still pretty strained between him and his wife. However,
things get real when a recent guest turns up dead in the desert. It has
happened before they are unhelpful told. “Fortunately,” Howard, the
coffee-mooching sheriff’s deputy is always popping around to make things
awkward.
Looking Glass isn’t much of a
mystery, but it gives Nic Cage an opportunity to bulge his eyeballs out like a
cartoon character. Still, by his standards, this is quite a restrained,
simmering-on-the-inside kind of performance. Regardless, the moteliers’ relationship
dynamics are surprisingly down-to-earth and believable, even if the basic
premise—that they would try to work through their grief by buying the Bates
Motel—is not.
There
are absolutely no surprises in this film. Seriously, we know who the bad guy is
as soon as Suspect X struts into the picture. However, it is entertaining to
watch Cage chew the scenery, along with the colorful supporting cast, including
Marc Blucas, Bill Bolender, and Ernie Lively, as the deputy, the former owner,
and the trucker, respectively.
In
many ways, Looking Glass is a throwback
to those 1980s cable-ready erotic thrillers that often had the words “bedroom”
and “eyes” in the title. That makes it super-fitting to have Nic Cage peering
beady-eyed through the mirror. Hunter certainly keeps it chugging along briskly.
Since the 1990s, he has mostly directed for television (including the TV movie The Lies of the Twins, based on the same
pseudonymous Joyce Carol Oates novel as Double Lover), but his first film was the rapturously received S.E. Hinton
adaptation, Tex. He has had an
interesting career. The gleefully lurid Looking
Glass makes it even more so. It is not really recommended, but if you want
to see it, we wouldn’t dissuade you, because it’s exactly what you’re expecting.
It opens this Friday (2/16) in limited markets and also releases on iTunes.
