Movie Review: Piercing

Piercing *** / *****

Directed by: Nicolas Pesce.

Written by: Nicolas Pesce based on the novel by Ryu Murakami.

Starring: Christopher Abbott (Reed), Mia Wasikowska (Jackie), Laia Costa (Mona), Olivia Bond (Bunny Girl), Maria Dizzia (Reed’s Mother), Marin Ireland (Chevonne), Dakota Kustick (Young Reed), Wendell Piece (Doctor).

 

Piercing is about two fucked up people who are fucked up in precisely the right way for each other. It is about their shifting power dynamics that play out over the course of one long night of foreplay – although foreplay for just what exactly is an open question – even at the end of the movie. It’s a film that I kept thinking was about to shift into a different gear, and just never really does. The twist, that comes about halfway through the movie, is both necessary – because at that point, there’s very little this film could do otherwise, and slightly disappointing, and it confirms it’s going to be the film you thought it was going to be from the moment Jackie (Mia Wasikowska) plunges scissors into her own leg.

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as we don’t meet Jackie until about 20 minutes in Piercing. Until then, we’re with Reed (Christopher Abbott) – husband, and new father, who we first see hovering over his new baby, ice pick in hand. Presumably, so he doesn’t kill his child, he decides to check into a high end hotel, hire a prostitute and kill her instead. We see this would be Patrick Bateman awkwardly practice his routine – what he’s going to say to the prostitute when she gets there, and what he’s going to do to her. His plans go awry soon after Jackie does show up, and they engage in awkward small talk – then she retires to the bathroom, and that is where she stabs herself with those scissors.

 

The first act is almost all in that hotel room – in the lead up and aftermath to that action. The second half is all in Jackie’s apartment – Reed, for reasons only he could really explain, doesn’t just abandon her at the hospital, but waits for her to get out, and then does home with her. It soon becomes clear that what we thought we knew about both of them is wrong.

 

The film was directed by Nicolas Pesce, who made a splash with his art house horror film The Eyes of My Mother a few years ago. Like that film, Piercing is a much better looking film than it is a film in total. Pesce’s visual reference points here are much different here than in his last film – here, it’s sleazy 1970s film, like soft core porn of that era, or giallo films (something Peter Strickland has done better in Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy and the upcoming In Fabric). The film is amazingly well made. And the performances by Abbott and Wasikowska are excellent in different ways.

 

I do wish, much like I did with The Eyes of My Mother, that the film seemed to be about anything other than its style though. Pesce introduces some backstory for Reed in the (very) late stages of this movie in an attempt to explain something about him – but it doesn’t really work. He does no such thing for Jackie, who remains a cipher to the end.

 

Still, I think Pesce has a great movie in him. He is certainly a great stylist. Perhaps all he needs to get someone else to write the screenplay next time around.