Fear X

Harry Cain (John Turturro) slowly opens the curtains of his suburban dwelling, somewhere in Utah in the wintry midwest of America. Harry’s wife has just been shot dead in the car park of one of those anonymous shopping malls where he works as a security guard. Harry is a broken man, but he has to know why his wife was killed. Apart from his wife, someone else was murdered; the police faces a puzzle. Harry gazes endlessly at the videotapes of the shopping mall security cameras, looking for suspicious persons. When the police is finally able to produce a very fuzzy picture of the suspected culprit, Harry realises that this man may well have lived in the house across the road for some time. The police do not have enough evidence to take any further action, so he sets out to investigate himself. The trail leads to freezing Montana.Fear X, written by Refn and Hubert Selby jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream) was beautifully shot by cameraman Larry Smith (Eyes Wide Shut) as a psychological film noir. In a subdued way, Turturro shapes the character of the anti hero Harry, who can do nothing other than continue to seek for the significance of the apparently senseless murder. But what is eventually revealed is probably less important than what remains hidden.