Knives and Skin

Now you might have got more from this if you were ever a fan of "Glee", but you certainly won't if you're a fan of anything by way of a decent crime noir - even if this were to be Lynchian inspired. "Carolyn" has been kidnapped - perhaps she read the script - and so her small town American neighbours begin to turn in on themselves as they seek a suspect. In the course of that search, we and they uncover or expose aspects of a myriad of characterisations from amidst their community that start to toxify the place quite spectacularly - though not remotely menacingly. As a sort of fly-on-walls observation of human nature at it's most varied, this actually does work from time to time - not least thanks to the only really notable acting effort from Marika Engelhardt as "Lisa", the mother of the absentee - but for the rest of it it struggles to retain any interesting cohesion until very near the end when an element of sense emerges. By that stage, though, ennui had largely set in for me and I had given up. That is always one of the problems with dramas like this. When you craft a screenplay that is too close to reality, you also inject an inherent element of unremarkableness to it. Modern life isn't so much rubbish as pedestrian, and watching this unfold is not really much different. What doesn't help is the tendency to commit much of the dialogue to song - and lyrics with some cat/sat/mat rhymes that do it few favours, either. "Knife + Heart" (2018) it certainly isn't and it wasn't really for me, either. Sorry.