Review of The Canal (2014) by Michael S — 11 Oct 2014

THE CANAL is undeniably well-made, and it flirts with some terrific ideas, but it doesn't completely satisfy on either a narrative or thematic level. Centrally, the movie plays with ideas of marital and paternal anxieties, and for a long section of the running time, it's rather effective towards this end.

The movie really begins as something of a domestic drama/character study, though it quickly begins to seed in more and more elements of the supernatural (some of which feel more organic than others). There are some quite striking and disturbing moments of violence which heighten a feeling of unease, and there are also some rather surreal touches that give some moments a hallucinatory or dreamlike quality.

The lead performance by Evans is very good, and he does a fine job of conveying the character's increasingly disturbed mental state. Ultimately, though, the movie is more effective as a mood piece than as a narrative, and it becomes very frustrating to have to watch our protagonist begin to behave in a totally irrational way, which is the path the script eventually sends us on, which makes for a pretty deeply unsatisfying watch.

Even worse than that, the film decides to inflict upon us the most over-used (and predictable!) "twist" ending in the history of genre cinema; words can't adequately convey how tired I am of seeing this kind of resolution, yet somehow filmmakers keep employing this particular narrative device.

All told, there are some neat individual frightening bits, but it doesn't all come together in the way it needs to in order to be a success. And that ending... well, it borders on insulting.