Ticking Man

Lensed as crisp and lethal as the crosshairs in a sniper's scope, THE TICKING MAN is a nail-biting thriller set on Scotland's western seacoast. A multi-million-pound drug deal, away from prying eyes, has gone wrong and one of the parties is summarily eliminated. Despite the remote locale, two unidentified residents (actually a squabbling pair of estranged lovers) witness the murder from a distance. The jailed crime kingpin decides on the harshest solution imaginable. It's a tiny community. With careful scrutiny and logic, the list of people who might be called to testify can be pared down to a handful. A “manageable” handful. “A wee bit of collateral damage,” he says, trivial compared to the innocent thousands mown down by rogue superpowers over control of the Panama Canal or Persian Gulf oil fields. So the order goes out to an icy, black-clad assassin, armed with crossbow bolts, bullets, grenades and a stopwatch: kill them all. With a deadly pace and knife-edged use of split screen, Steven Lewis Simpson's feature clocks in as the CIFF's most lethal weapon.