Set in contemporary London but shot largely in a Belfast prison so miserable that you suspect it can’t be unacquainted with dirty protests in times past (bloody movie stars and their exotic location work), debut director John Simpson’s oddity casts Lee Evans as Sean Veil, a man acquitted of a grisly double murder ten years previously. His accusers, a crooked cop (a typically menacing McGinley) and a careerist criminal profiler (McNiece, with the booming theatrical subtlety of Brian Blessed through a megaphone) remain determined to prove his guilt, so Sean lives as a paranoid recluse, recording every second of his life on wobbly steadicam lest the same fate befall him again. Which of course it does. Help arrives in the unlikely form of glamorous reporter Katie Carter (Stirling), but will she prove as twisted as everybody else in this movie seems to be? Well, much worse, as it happens.
Joining the ranks of surveillance flicks such as My Little Eye and Section 8, this latest post-reality TV offering is (initially) suitably sinister, conceptually quite challenging and loaded with big, hefty ideas that nod toward Foucault and Orwell and so forth. But just as you’re there thinking ‘Ah, so we make our own prisons’ and, ‘So Big Brother isn’t just a vile televisual concept of ever-limboing standards’, things go terrifically awry. Suddenly, the budgetary constraints and the director’s inexperience tell above his sparky intent, and the final act ain’t pretty. I know worthwhile ideas lurk somewhere amidst the mortifying emoting, the shockingly half-hearted plotting and 1970s New Zealand soap-opera vibe, but that’s small consolation when faced with Rachael Stirling’s performance. Honestly, she could do with acting lessons from Madonna, and the ludicrous, lurid scene wherein she straddles and ‘rapes’ Lee Evans makes J-Lo’s notorious gobble-gobble guff sound like Shakespeare’s finest hour.
Thankfully, there are some positives. Though extremely lo-fi with occasional lapses into we’ve-got-a-grey/blue-filter-lens-and-we’re-going-to use-it student territory, Freeze Frame is stylishly and defiantly dreary in a manner that echoes gritty post-Carnaby downer Brit-flicks like A Day in the Life of Joe Egg or The Killing of Sister George, with a grainy, technophile video twist.
Lee Evans helps the cause too. His classical, knockabout comedy is so cheery you can’t help but suspect him to be harbouring all manner of interesting, secret torments, and his thoroughly creepy performance here will do much to advance that theory. Those trademark Mr. Grimsdale grimaces and that gimpy posture serve the atmosphere of jittery paranoia well, while his shaved eyebrows are very Syd Barrett.
But neither he nor the director’s flashes of invention can save this puppy. This is a hard film to love, and still harder to enjoy. Except maybe ironically. Pity.