Torso

You can always rely on help from Mom and Dad

2002

Review: January 18, 2007

Director: Alex Chapple

Starring: Kathleen Robinson, Callum Keith Rennie, Victor Garber, Brenda Fricker, Ken James

Why not lay off for one night? You're building up a tolerance. People are starting to notice.

THE SETUP:

The true tale of this woman whose husband was found dismembered and her sensational court case. Sensational for Canada, that is.

DISCUSSION:

So there was this special Halloween feature in the Onion where Eli Roth picked out 24 hours worth of horror films, and he ended with this Italian movie from the 70s, Torso, which he said was just fuckin' nuts, and I threw it on my Netflix list. What I didn't notice is that Netflix does not carry the Italian version from the 70s, but only this, a Canadian television production about a notorious murder in 1916. The whole situation is unusual because I usually micromanage my Netflix queue with far more fastidiousness than any other aspect of my life. Anyway, I decided I wasn't even going to read the envelope, just watch it. I'm just so fucking devil-may-care.

We open with a close-up of red lipstick slowly coming out of its sheath. I think anyone with a male dog knows what this symbolizes. Then we have the credits, under which we see the main character of the story, Evelyn Dick, dance through a room of rich older men, flirting with them all, while we hear this song "Melancholy Lullaby." The sequence ends with a close-up of her smoking a cigar. You know, Freud famously said that sometimes a cigar is JUST a cigar. Well, not this time. By the end of this sequence I could tell, just from the LOOK and TONE, that I was watching a production of Canadian television. That's no dis—Canadian television is generally better and more interesting than American feature films. At least they're aimed above the mental level of someone in a high chair.

It is Hamilton, Canada, 1916! Where the fuck is Hamilton, Canada? Okay, I just looked, and it's in the Westernmost crux of Lake Ontario, just around the bend from Toronto. You see, I learn a lot from this site… just from the amount of things I have to look up so I don't come off like a douchebag. Anyway, these boys are playing in the woods one day when they come across something that looks like a brown leather knapsack. Only it's a man's mutilated torso! When the cops go to Evelyn's house to tell her about it she says something along the lines of "Well don't ask me, I don't know anything about it," displaying absolutely no emotion whatsoever over the death of her husband. She says she and her husband were married AND divorced six months prior. Then the movie reaches from noir tone as the investigator follows Evelyn as she goes on a date with a much older man, goes back to his house, and gives him head.

The Investigator is Inspector Wood, played by Callum Keith Rennie, who has a touch of the Daniel Craig about him. I'd have to lay them both side by side to be sure. Anyway, soon they find a car that Evelyn borrowed the night of the murder, and its interior is covered in blood. Evelyn gives a story about how it all happened, and when the inspector goes outside the room, he sees that she lifted it wholesale from the front page of that day's paper! So apparently she's some kind of compulsive liar, and this flummoxes the police, who can't get her to acknowledge several of the swiftly-accruing pieces of evidence at all, and are obliged to investigate her stories—she earlier told them of people who don't exist—even while suspecting they aren't true. Regardless, they just can't get Evelyn to show a shred of concern or remorse. Around this time we start getting evidence that both her mother and father are crazy, too. Her mother comes in to her cell and starts putting makeup on the prisoner in a way that points to a lot of strange behavior in the past.

SPOILERS > > >
So they decide to search Mom and Dad's house and find a comic book with a person carved down to just a torso—like the real-life killing—and a nearly identical table and huge knives in the father's storeroom. So Mom and Dad are arrested as well, but their cases go nowhere, and after a while Evelyn is formally charged with the murder. The case is a huge sensation, crowds turning out to watch. In court, the prosecution and the judge [all older men] turn the focus of the case to the amount of men Evelyn has had sex with, making her state precisely how many men she's slept with—then name them. Soon Evelyn has become something of a star and is surrounded by paparazzi and signs autographs when entering jail.

Then—her mother turns on her and testifies against her! By now this movie is jutting off in so many different directions, you never know what to expect—and this is not necessarily a bad thing. First it starts to seem like it's about Evelyn as compulsive liar. Then it's about her crazy parents and this web of insanity. Then it's about how she becomes a media star. It keeps changing, and remarkably, this becomes a strength, making the film a collection of different ways of looking at the case. We'll come back to this.

Anyway, after Evelyn's mother testifies against her, the crowd outside turns on her, too! No one likes you when your own mother doesn't like you—just remember that. Anyway, Evelyn is sentenced to be hung, which provides her with a new outlet for her narcissism, as she can then lie catatonic on the floor of her cell and obsess over what hanging feels like and what if she doesn't die right away.

Then she finally gets an appeals lawyer to visit her—this is Victor Garber as Robinette. He's all optimistic at first, but soon comes up against the famous Evelyn stonewall. She does let slip that she sleeps with her mother, even as an adult. "My mother wants what's best for me," Evelyn says. Then there's a scene where the mother is on the stand but not on trial, which makes it a bit ludicrous that she allows herself to be grilled so harshly by Robinette. Now we start to see flashbacks that Evelyn's mom groomed her as a prostitute for older men from a young age, and soon enough have an uncomfortably long molestation scene with her father. These are presented as memories of Evelyn's, and we're left confused as to whether Robinette knows this stuff or not. He starts to ask Evelyn if she remembers anything about her childhood—she doesn't, not one thing—asking her when she lost her first tooth. Evelyn claims never to have so much as lost a tooth. "I was perfect," she says. "Perfect in every way."

But wait—Inspector Wood gets a tip and finds a baby encased in cement in Evelyn's parents attic. They told Evelyn they were giving it away for adoption, but, well, I guess not. Evelyn finally gets a reduced charge of manslaughter, which means she won't be hung but will spend her life in prison. Through it all, Evelyn cannot be made to turn on her parents at all, or to believe that her parents don't want anything but the best for her. One of the final shots is Evelyn being led away to prison, and seeing her mother "prettying" the face of Evelyn's three-year-old daughter, and taking her by the hand, presumably to screw up as badly as Evelyn. The end!
< < < SPOILERS END

As I said, the movie keeps pushing in different tonal directions—first Evelyn is innocent, then she's a compulsive liar, then she's a vicious man-killer, then she's just a victim of her crazy parents… and for a while this works very well as a way of presenting the different aspects of the case. The problem is that by the end, there have been so many different directions that you're left without really knowing what to think, and this robs the movie of its ability to make much of an impression at all. I've watched the movie AND read the synopsis of the real case—twice—and still don't have a clear picture of what actually happened. So it was all mostly interesting, but unfortunately is just a well-done case history, not leaving one with any clear statement or memorable theme to walk away from it with.

The point-of-view problems continue with the flashbacks. The movie dramatizes stories Evelyn tells that are later revealed to be untrue, which is one approach, but one that reveals its limitations later when we have other flashbacks, such as Evelyn's molestation, and aren't sure if they can be believed. It also gets confusing and jarring when we, the audience, are being given so much information, then have to go back to Robinette, arguing Evelyn's case with about one-tenth the information we have. The essay on the real story only mentions suspicion of sexual abuse, so we have to assume that the whole thing of the career training Evelyn's mother puts her through and subsequent other home details are entirely speculation. I'm afraid that these things come off as just half-rate writing and direction. They just don't have control over the point of view and structure. What one is left with is a very interesting story, but no larger sense of significance or resonance. It's a magazine article when it could have been a novel.

The DVD also contains trailers for three awfully Canadian-looking movies, one of which is a martial arts-horror-comedy starring what looks to be a frequently-shirtless Adam Baldwin, so that one's on my list. One of the others is for a very amateurish-looking horror thing clearly based on Buffy/Angel and with an amusingly deadpan hero, but eventually the stupidity of it is the greatest impression it makes. That one is not on the list.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

If you want. It's an interesting time-filler, but on the other hand you could just look up Evelyn Dick on Wikipedia.