SUTURE

In terms of pure originality, complexity and mesmerizing mastery of the medium, Scott McGehee and David Siegel's SUTURE is being hailed as the most assured debut film of the year. Shot in glorious black-and-white wide-screen Panavision, this film is a homage to the style and overlit, pristine look of the melodrama and paranoid thrillers of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The series of disorienting images and events and shifting points of view are heightened by a visual paradox, central to the story, which lends a surreality to the film. Essentially a story of mistaken identity, the narrative revolves around Vincent's need to hide his secret past. The arrival of his estranged half-brother Clay seems fortuitous, but the blotched murder attempt on Clay not only ruins Victor's plan to assume his identity, but effectively shifts the narrative to Clay's struggle, through the scars of the explosive attack and the haze of amnesia, to piece together his life and recontruct his memory. Visually stunning, SUTURE makes us confront a set of assumptions about what we are watching, whose reality we are seeing and through whose eyes. McGehee and Siegel have created a work that is compelling and intellectually engaging, a prfound accomplishment.-Kit Kalfs.