An average movie

Since I kept hearing some pretty good things about this movie, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though it was certainly a decent directing debut for Joel Edgerton, to be honest, I wasn’t completely sold by the damned thing. I mean, the directing was really solid and Edgerton really displayed some potential in this area. Furthermore, the three actors involved (Jason Bateman, Rebecca Hall and Joel Edgerton himself) were all really strong  but, eventually,  the story didn’t really work for me. Basically, they took the very generic formula of the stalker thriller and they tried to be clever by switching the roles (the stalker was in fact the victim and the victim was actually a major douchebag). However, such tricks usually don’t work because the characters becomes in the process usually seriously inconsistent. For example, Simon started out as a rather arrogant dude but he became suddenly quite despicable and it was rather unbelievable that Robyn would have never noticed it before. The half-baked plot about him getting ridd off another job candidate didn’t help either. Seriously, pretty much within 24 hours, this guy Danny claims that he had set him up, his boss finds out the truth and Simon gets fired which was all mighty fast. There was a similar same problem with Gordo. Of course, at some point, you feel sorry about the guy but he still did some seriously weird sh*t and the biggest victim was probably Robyn when she was actually completely innocent.  Another massively half-baked sub-plot was Robyns’s pill-popping past which should have probably been removed. Anyway, to conclude, even if it was too flawed for my taste, it was still a decent thriller and a really solid directing debut for Joel Edgerton and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.