Clean, Shaven

Kerrigan's feature debut is an edgy, engrossing, intelligent study of schizophrenia, formulated as an impressionistically fragmented variation of the hunter/hunted road thriller. Right from the start, we can see that Peter Winter (Greene) is falling apart at the seams; his reaction to a small girl bouncing a ball against his car, coupled with reports of murder on the radio, suggest that he's probably also homicidal. At any rate, he sets off across a bleak landscape, visiting his far-from-welcoming mother and searching for the daughter whose company he's been denied; meanwhile, a detective is on his trail, checking out murder locations and contacting Winter's estranged wife for clues as to his likely whereabouts and intentions. What lifts the film out of the rut is its use of expressionistic sound design (there's little dialogue, let alone plot) and occasionally disturbing images to reveal Winter's wretched, hallucinatory perceptions of the world around him; few movie portraits of the paranoid experience have been so detailed or, for that matter, so harrowing.