The hell that awaits the murdering duo of Jennifer Chambers Lynch's Surveillance doesn't seem all that different from the blazing pavement and sheer emptiness of the film's nameless environs. Populated by aimless drifters, cokeheads, and cops so bored (or just plain godless) that they shoot out the tires of passing cars to make quota, the stretch of desert where the film exists could be the highway to hell or, more likely, just another patch of lawless American terrain.
For a pair of homicidal maniacs, it is the land of plenty. Stacking up bodies as if in competition with Mallory and Mickey Knox, they buzz by the radar of FBI Agents Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond), who find their way to a middle-of-nowhere police precinct where three witnesses are being held. They are videotaped as Lynch deploys Rashomonian flashbacks that intertwine the stories of a drug addict (Pell James), a young girl (Ryan Simpkins), and a dirty cop (Kent Harper, who also co-wrote and produced the film) who have had a run in with bloodthirsty diptych.
Jennifer Chambers Lynch, as one may have gathered, is the daughter of mad hatter David Lynch, who serves as executive producer and donates a song, the trippy "Speed Roadster," to the soundtrack. Besides certain casting decisions and a natural distaste for the normal, the younger Lynch has admirably distanced herself from her father. Forever lost in the ethereal fog of his solipsistic dream world, David Lynch's perceived realities are always someone else's nightmares; for his daughter, the world itself is one.
Following her widely loathed debut Boxing Helena, Lynch modestly flips the current trend of serial killer films for a loop. The overall structure of the plot is to hunt down the killers, but very little time is spent on their grim spree. Indeed, Lynch seems far more interested in the petty bickering and soulless disregard given by everyday people than she does with the massacring psychopaths. Even after we eventually learn who the murderers are, Lynch is careful neither to assign motive nor to build up their psychology. Someone once said "true horror is not knowing why," and Lynch was listening carefully
Surveillance isn't rewriting history, but it's a solid, entertaining third draft. The light of day makes the film's central sequence -- two perverse cops' harassment that builds to a bloodbath -- all the more discomfiting; whereas most serial killers seem to operate in perpetual nocturne, Lynch's faceless marauders dig the sun.
On her own terms, Lynch has grown by leaps and bounds in craft and tone. As the direct progeny of one of America's preeminent filmmakers, she's doing what every girl does: Rejects her father even as she searches for something resembling him.
