By Eric Kohn

Look
Directed by Adam Rifkin


A surveillance society lives in fear of being watched, but Adam Rifkin’s Look shows us living in naked ignorance. Despite that appreciable premise, the movie’s experiment is just tricky mise-en-scene. Everything takes place as though captured on numerous hidden cameras, leading to a series of unconventional perspectives. The action is often framed in clever ways, such as a convenience store seen from the ceiling and fishbowl angles created in the interior of an ATM. Buried in the design, Rifkin intends some kind of incisive commentary about a nascent Orwellian society, but the argument is undone by its own cleverness.
Like NBC’s “The Office,” Rifkin’s project belongs to a fantastical realm under the guise documentary realism, poised to imitate reality while simultaneously defying it. The gimmick is only sustained by stretching the truth. In a variety of stories that mostly don’t overlap, cameras see everything: Runaway crooks murder a cop and terrorize the neighborhood; a nubile teen seduces her teacher; a shopping mall manager sexually harasses his employees. Supposedly, no scandal is free from the watchful electronic eye—except that we never see people in the privacy of their bedrooms, and the only window into one household is through the nanny cam.

Look responds to contemporary paranoia fostered by recent stories of wiretapping and the like, but writer-director Rifkin cheapens his ambition with facile melodrama. As the stories strain credulity, the experiment grows obvious. Virtually every situation devolves into a police matter, but the technology doesn’t appear at fault. Notwithstanding its radical composition, Look has a fairly conservative message.

In the deplorable tradition of Brian De Palma’s Redacted, Rifkin makes a flawed attempt to replicate off-the-cuff dialogue. The whole thing feels so heavily scripted that it brings down the overarching impact. The misguided route raises the question of what kind of juicy stories might be produced by the real thing. It’s hard not to imagine a better movie buried in some CIA vault—assuming that it hasn’t already been burnt.