DVD reviews: The Tourist | Confessions

Published on Thursday 21 April 2011 19:43

The Tourist Optimum, £19.99

REWATCHING The Tourist on DVD, it's still odd to see two of the world's sexiest and most enigmatic movie stars generating so little heat – or even interest in what they're doing – when plonked together on screen for two hours. Yet there Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie are, drifting through Venice in what appears to be a daze, the former apparently convinced he's in a slapstick spy spoof, the latter an action movie, while the supporting cast seem intent on veering between gangster film, wrong-man thriller and bumbling undercover farce. The plot involves Jolie, as the under-surveillance lover of a missing criminal, corraling Depp's schoolteacher into a world of high intrigue to throw Russian gangsters and cops off her trail, but the mystery is how the film went so badly wrong. Some explanations can be found in the behind-the-camera talent, with screenwriters Chris McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey) respectively providing gritty violence and swooning glamour, and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others) apparently too scared to make a decision about what kind of movie he wants to make. The result is a bad pastiche of films such as Charade. That it's actually a remake of a little-seen French film from 2005 called Anthony Zimmer just goes to show how incoherent it really is.

Confessions

Third Window, 14.99

Confessions on the other hand is an unsettling revenge drama that knows exactly what it is, and what it wants to achieve, yet still manages to take an unusual route to reach its hard-hitting end point. It opens with a schoolteacher (Takako Matsu) announcing her retirement to her unruly class. The reason is her four-year-old daughter, who was found dead in the school's swimming pool. She knows two of her pupils murdered her child and, after announcing this, tells them she has infected the recently consumed milk of the guilty parties with HIV-positive blood. What follows is a disturbing meditation on group fear, paranoia and bullying as this bombshell causes the guilty students to react unpredictably while their classmates fear reprisals. Shot using moody, dreamy colour schemes and frequent slow-motion sequences, its horror is hypnotic rather than gruesome, but the effect is as discomforting as the more extreme revenge movies that tend to come out of Japan.

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