A lawyer tasked with defending a robbery-and-murder suspect begins developing doubts about what truly happened.
24 Mar The Third Murder (2017)
Wandering narratives
You only have a few choices in film, alas. So when a filmmaker wants an adventure in narrative form, they are constrained. I come to these not for the experience, but to see the choices that have been made and whether they are effective.
This is a bit like many other film experiences I’ve had — elements you could even say are copied. But what it boils down to is two men, usually separated by a glass pane in real life, but whose retrospective pasts get mixed.
We usually follow the detective in a conventional seeking for truth. In noir, we have a special role for the viewer in manipulating reality, often inconveniently for the on-screen characters. Here, it is modern noir in that sense, but the viewer is not any more connected than the two men.
Our confessed murderer not only did not do it, he’s unsure what happened. So we are bound in a discovery/confusion braid with these two men — not as they settle on the truth, but instead some other world. We’ve seen that world from time to time as ‘dream sequences’ and fabulated flashbacks.
The ambiguity is the point, its construction and complexity.
If you are going into this after reading the comment, hold a few fringe possibilities in mind: The detective’s daughter is the one with the limp, caused by him. The victim’s wife is culpable, and the sexual dynamics fake.
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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