Untraceable - out now
Jennifer Marsh (Diana Lane) is a widowed FBI officer who spends her nights online tracking down identity thieves, fraudsters and cyber pervs. One night she stumbles across a website named killwithme.com where a cute kitten is being tortured to death. A disclaimer on the main page states that the more people who visit the site, the worse the killings will be - a few nights later the psychotic webmaster has moved onto humans.
Following the formula of Se7en, the killer is driven by a perverse moral agenda – to expose the people’s voyeuristic tendencies through ‘torture porn’. In one of the films many clichés, Marsh is caught between fighting crime and neglecting her daughter, who also becomes a target for the psychopath.
The cinematography is well executed, and despite its formulaic plot, the film presents a fairly good script. Diane Lane’s performance is Untraceable’s greatest asset, both vulnerable and determined, however many of the cliched narrative devices are in place; wisecracking partner Colin Hanks providing welcome comic relief, a deaf cop who is available to lip-read, and an obstructive senior officer type.
The film presents itself as a moral critique on the voyeuristic aspects of mass media, yet unashamedly indulges in it with several close-ups of bubbling skin, necrotising wounds and water-tanks clouded with blood. The kernel of a really great idea is present here, but should have been explored more for the audience to feel complicit in what they are watching to feel even more uncomfortable.
Better than your average thriller but in the scheme of things the film has an apt title – it won’t take long to disappear without a trace in the archives of mediocre horror. The website killwithme.com has been reproduced as part of a neat viral campaign, along with the usual brace of You Tube clips - check it out if you’re bored on your lunch hour, but just don’t leave it up on your monitor unattended lest a passing co-worker sees it.
