Looking Glass is a 2018 thriller about a couple who buy a desert motel where they find that strange, mysterious events occur.
So here we go again, another film starring Nicholas Cage, a human rollercoaster ride of acting, who has for a long time now taken us on a wide swath of ups and downs … mostly downs … in his career of late. While he’s done very good work here and there, he is, unfortunately, spending a lot of time in low grade, underwhelming films that simply don’t take advantage of his abilities or just flat don’t work. Such is the case with Tim Hunter‘s latest Looking Glass, a painfully derivative and unimaginative thriller that spoils its potential, even with a few good performances.
Ray (Cage) and Maggie (Robin Tunney) are a married couple making a new start after a terrible tragedy has left them devastated. Packing up their car, they drive into the Arizona desert where they have bought an old time motor lodge, though on arrival, are met only by a note and a creepy phone call from the man (Bill Bolender) who sold it to them, seemingly desperate to get it off his hands. They soon become acquainted with some of the locals and oddball regulars to the motel, including a pair of S&M lesbians and a truck driver with certain tastes. Not long after, as Ray and Maggie battle with rebuilding their relationship, he stumbles upon the previous owner’s secret, a series of tunnels in the ceiling that allow him to peek into the rooms below, though things take a hard twist when a guest turns up dead.
The recent Netflix documentary Voyeur details the real life story of Gerald Foos, a Colorado motel owner who spent decades spying on his quests through peepholes in the ceiling, and surely seems source for Jerry Rapp and Matthew Wilder‘s script, who naturally layer in more lurid ingredients to their tale. What we get though is a generic point-by-numbers movie of the week story that never taps into its potential as is should, skipping motivations and character arcs for low hanging fruit.
Cage is not just restrained, which isn’t such a bad thing, but dulled down to a flat edge, leaving him mostly lost in a shallow pool of movie clichés. There are good ideas here, but woefully underdeveloped. Ray and Maggie are having trouble finding their groove again, Ray feeling sexually repressed, seen in one moment when she rolls over in bed after he makes a feeble invitation, igniting his sudden need to watch others. Those others are quite the collection of oddballs, all of whom are pigeonholed into a becoming suspects. Indeed, Hunter goes out of his way to paint everything in broad strokes, leaving no turns in the story we don’t see coming miles ahead of arrival.
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Cage is still rather good, playing a man caught up in a sordid mystery, his wide-eyed slack-jawed approach sort of on spot for what the role demands. Tunney is even better, an actress all too underused in film, though her character is trapped in the corners. The real problem is the movie’s tepidness (and an absolutely problematic score). Made like it’s produced for primetime, it cuts it legs out from under itself by refusing to go as dark as it should. It’s too bad because there is a good story here somewhere, it’s just lost in the mundane.