‘We got a serial killer,” announces a policeman in this retro 1990s-style thriller directed by David Lipper; evidence has comes back that an enigmatic, super-clever suspect (played by Dylan Sprouse) has the blood of three different people on his clothing. (But if the victims were all killed at roughly the same time, wouldn’t that make him a mass murderer?) It’s best not to get too hung up on nomenclature or to think too hard about anything here – like how can one character predict that an ordinary pen would get left behind in a room to serve as a convenient murder weapon? Just go with the throwback vibe, the moody underlit cinematography, and growling subsonic score. Even the faces vaguely recall B- and C-movie fodder from the 1990s/early 2000s including Josh Duhamel and Til Schweiger, here playing a retiring police detective and his mysteriously German commanding officer, respectively.
Duhamel’s Shaw is nominally the protagonist here, although he’s consistently upstaged by Sprouse’s blood-splattered murderer, called AJ, who pulls out the unsettling high-pitched giggles and evil smirks we’ve come to expect from our movie killers. It turns out that AJ has left a trail of clues leading to each of his recent murders that Shaw must unravel if he’s to find his own teenage son (Corbin Pitts), who AJ has locked up in some underground lair with only hours left until he runs out of air.
There’s a strong whiff of David Fincher’s Seven lingering in the air, so much so that one expects a box to get delivered any moment with a surprise body part inside. But in the end the script isn’t tricksy enough to pull off any huge surprises, and instead calls back to another Fincher classic, Fight Club, but without that latter film’s clever twists either. Still, for all its cack-handedness, there’s some effort here to grapple with issues around institutional and personal guilt and the wrongs done to young people that might turn them into smirking, giggling serial killers … or mass murderers, depending on how you define the term.