Spinning Man is a 2018 thriller about a happily married professor, known for having many affairs with students, who becomes the prime suspect when a young woman has gone missing.
I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a trippy intellectual thriller and everything about the premise of Simon Kaijser‘s Spinning Man is loaded with hooks. This is a character-driven potboiler with a great cast and a solid source (it’s based on the book of the same name by George Harrar), and while the acting is the real lifesaver here, there’s still plenty in the style and story that make this well worth a look.
In classic setup, a somewhat disheveled man is escorted into an interrogation room where a world-weary detective sits in waiting. The man is Evan Birch (Guy Pearce), a seemingly low to the ground philosophy instructor, and the cop is Malloy (Pierce Brosnan), graying and skeptical. Before barely a word is said between them though, we flashback five weeks prior and learn that a young woman named Joyce (Odeya Rush), a local teenage cheerleader, has gone missing. Evan is the prime suspect, cops fearing she is already dead. He seems a normal guy, married to Ellen (Minnie Driver) and raising a couple of kids, though Malloy sees cracks, and there are hints things are not right, including Evan’s relationship with Anna (Alexandra Shipp), a student at the college.
A film like this relies on its subtext with quiet, curious characters keeping things off balance and the film’s greatest strength comes from the cat and mouse between Malloy and Evan. The interviews and questions slowly tug at loose threads, leading to a tense unspooling as Evan’s story seems to grow weaker the more Malloy applies pressure. Malloy is no dummy and it’s plenty fun to see him craft his words with surgical precision. Pearce does good work with the fidgety professor but this is all Brosnan, who does some off his best work in years.
Where the film loses it footing is where it starts, falling into an aggravating trap of late where filmmakers show something crucial in the opening and then flashback to let the story build back to it. While that might have some value in some stories, here it bascial deflates the punch the great story stitches together. More so, there is some effort to lead us down a certain path, one where we are meant to question something important about one character that never really has the payoff intended. However, these are not enough to really throw it off its rails, the dialogue and high-quality suspense more than making ups for these flaws.
While Driver is underused, she adds what can she to the thankless role, her presence significant in a few key moments, and Shipp is cornered into a pretty tropey role, playing the too-young temptress meant to lead good men astray. Still, I liked the moody setting and simmering tension Kaijser builds throughout, patient with these character even if there is some flaws in the presentation. If you enjoy crime dramas where the words are more deadly than the action, this will surely fit the bill and offer a solid night of thriller entertainment.