Surveillance

Even if you can see the “big twist” coming in the first few minutes, Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s Surveillance is still an unsettling story about the aftermath of a brutally violent crime. Two FBI suits (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) are sent to interview witnesses of a mass murder committed along a lonely stretch of highway, but everyone involved has something to hide. The surviving cop is a sadist, the female witness is a junkie, and the other police officers are suspiciously hostile; only a quiet young girl (Ryan Simpkins) holds the key to solving the mystery. This is Lynch’s first film since 1993’s Boxing Helena, and she shows a real knack for skin-crawling tension, especially in the sequences in which two “bored” patrolmen play a creepy, Method version of good cop/bad cop.