Secret Things (2004)

It's better than any movie wherein 50% of the running time is sex has any right to be. And, for about an hour and a half, it's just plain ol' good. The sleek, well-designed visuals draw you into this film's seductive world, and as you enter you realize hey, wait, there's actually characters in this movie! With a real script 'n' stuff! Neil Labute is an obvious influence here, but by repositing the war of the sexes and corporate competition in purely libidinous terms, writer/director Jean-Claude Brisseau creates a film that is at once both entrancing and shamefully entertaining. The sex, too, is that rare specimen of movie sex -- geniunely erotic without feeling superfluous, overdone or plodding. It's a near-perfect synthesis of the art film and the sex film, the kind you figure Stanley Kubrick was thinking of when he spoke of making a big-star blue movie... until the film overheats and detonates itself in the last twenty minutes. For reasons unknown, Brisseau decided to push his scenario further than it needed to go, resulting in a climactic folly that retroactively makes the preceding stretches of film seem that much less interesting. Seriously, the ending of this film is daffy beyond belief. In the end, the film tries too hard to be an art film and ends up coming out merely as a supremely silly, well-shot sex film. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it could have been more.

Grade: B-