Public Access

An impressive debut from writer/director Singer, this chilly little parable taps into the poisonous well-springs of the middle-American psyche. When Whiley Pritcher (Marquette) arrives in Brewster, it's a quiet, complacent, no-account kind of place. He rents a room by the week and then sets about booking four slots of prime-time public access TV on the local cable TV station: Sunday, 7pm, 'family hour'. He calls the show 'Our Town' and asks, 'What's wrong with Brewster?' Before too long it's 'Who's wrong?' It's obvious from the way Whiley scrubs the bath naked that something's amiss, but as Singer probes his soft-spoken anti-hero, it becomes clear he'll stop at nothing to achieve his enigmatic ends. The film is overly measured, with lots of slow zooms and slow motion (even the actors seem to be on go-slow), but it's engrossing, and Marquette is a genuinely scary customer, a dry-cleaned all-American sociopath.