CCTV (known internationally as 13 Cameras, and on the festival circuit as Slumlord) is a movie that is theoretically about the growing fear of constant surveillance. It doesn't really work out that way, however. The movie doesn't capitalize on the unique fears that come with its subject, ultimately turning the voyeur into just another slasher monster with murky motivations. This is a film that is mainly made up of long stretches of nothing happening, before needlessly turning violent. It is a movie that doesn't really seem to understand what it is that makes the ubiquity of cameras so scary for some people.
Ryan and Claire (PJ McCabe and Brianne Moncrief) have just moved into a new house. Unbeknownst to both of them, their creepy landlord Gerald (Neville Archambault) has installed cameras all over the property. Gerald watches the drama that develops between the married couple. The two have grown apart ever since Claire got pregnant, and Ryan has been cheating on her with his assistant Hannah (Sarah Baldwin). All of them carry on in the house, completely unaware that Gerald is watching their every move, and is growing invested in their various issues.
The movie actually begins with text explaining that at least eight thousand people in the United States were being watched in their homes without their knowledge or consent in the last year. The film pounces on this sense of paranoia, crafting in Gerald an ugly, apparently disgusting individual who secretly watches people as they go about their business at home. The movie's fatal flaw is it never makes much of a character out of Gerald. It doesn't actually have him doing much in the movie that seems threatening. For the film, it is scary enough that this smelly old man is watching these people.
And while that is theoretically unsettling, it never really rises to a level that allows the movie to elicit any particular reaction. And the transition to violence is murky at best. The violence should inevitable, but there isn't enough escalation in the plot to warrant those later developments. Gerald becomes violent because the movie needs him to be, and not because it actually makes sense for his character to go there. Again, the film basically relies on making the character as ugly as possible, feeding into lazy prejudices about people who don't fall outside the conventional standards of beauty.
This would all be more tolerable if the drama between Ryan and Claire was anything worth caring about. The relationship is vapid and is merely a platform for a standard lurid plot. Stuff happens, but none of it feels substantial. There's no real emotion backing up the contrived drama, so it all just becomes a vehicle for the voyeuristic aspects of the story. The movie does benefit from the performance of Neville Archambault, who really commits to the strange physicality of the role. But again, there isn't really a whole lot to this character. He does stand out, however, in a movie that is otherwise carried by subpar actors.
CCTV lacks incident. The film fails to make its central conceit feel sinister. The fear of being watched has little to do with the voyeur becoming violent, but this is all the film really offers. The film builds little from the paranoia of being watched, the unsettling feeling that all of our deepest, darkest secrets are on display to an unseen voyeur. For most of the film, the threat doesn't feel like a threat, and when things do get dangerous, it actually gets less interesting. The film doesn't understand its own subject, delivering an utterly generic fate for its characters in spite of the specific nature of the threat.
My Rating:
