DOA November Cryptic Mystery to Forget

While photographer and teacher Sophie (Courtney Cox, NBC’s “Friends”) sits in the car, her boyfriend Hugh (James Le Gros, “My New Gun”) is shot and killed during a violent robbery. Racked by guilt, one day during class she comes across a slide of her car outside the convenience store that horrible evening. Was someone in her class there that fateful night? Is the killer trying to play with her already fragile mind by sending her cryptic clues to their identity? Or, is Sophie’s mental state already so unhinged by grief this picture is nothing more than an illusion sending her even closer to falling off the mental deep end?

The answers to these and other question are explored in overlapping images in “November,” a decidedly dark and twisty cerebral thriller from “Groove” director Greg Harrison. Shot on digital video and twisting backwards and forewords through time in order to showcase the same events from decidedly different angles, this is the type of enigma-filled puzzle box David Lynch could construct and decipher in his sleep. Probably a heck of a lot better too, for even with all of Harrison’s whiz-bang prowess behind the camera and an astonishingly controlled performance by Cox “November” is a mystery not remotely worth the effort it takes to solve.

This is certainly one picture were the questions outweigh the answers by at least ten to one. Not that I have a problem with that. If anything, I tend to find the unexplained for more intriguing and frightening than a concrete definition any day. I love movies like “Mulholland Dr.” or “Kiss Me Deadly,” noir-ish excursions into the unknown bristling with unsettling menace and brutish bravado. The dark corners hidden within the tangled streets of the mind the best place on earth to journey into the undiscovered, filmmakers like Hitchcock, Lang, Lynch, Cronenberg and Kubrick forging long astonishing successful careers mining each and every one of them. Here, unfortunately, all these twists, turns and obtuse camera movements only look pretentious, everything adding up to absolutely nothing of interest by the time things play themselves out. It’s a waste, a borderline insulting one, and I’m challenged to come up with much to say in its defense.

That’s maybe a bit too harsh. The film is if nothing else technically splendid, each sequence shot in a varying color-enhanced shade meant to signify one of Sophie’s cryptically ambiguous mental states. The closer the truth gets, the more these edges start to dissipate, the world slowly devolving into the neutral drab of everyday strum and drag. Expertly shot and edited, Harrison achieves the Lynch-like dreamscape he’s so obviously aiming for with relative ease, and no matter how banal or contrived Benjamin Brand’s screenplay gets it’s still impossible to take your eyes off what is going on.

But so what? The picture is an idiotic smorgasbord of clichés and idiocies with answers anyone who’s seen “Twin Peeks” or a random episode of “The Twilight Zone” are going to see coming from a mile away. Worse, Harrison wastes fine actors like Le Gross, Anne Archer (“Narrow Margin”) and Nora Dunn (“Working Girl”) in throwaway parts that make little to no sense in the ultimate scheme of things. Even though Cox does her best (and her steely self-assured minimalistic performance is the best thing going on), “November” has a pulse so static it’s nearly nonexistent. In fact, like the murder at its core this picture is so cold it’s actually DOA.

Film Rating: ê1/2  (out of 4)