Director/Screenplay – Nicolas Pesce, Based on the Novel by Ryu Murakami, Producers – Antonio Campos, Josh Mond, Schuyler Weiss & Jacob Wasserman, Photography – Zachary Galler, Visual Effects – Absolute Post (Supervisor – Ben Robards), Miniatures – Nix + Gerber Studios, Special Effects Supervisor – Andrew Flowers, Makeup Effects – Prosthetic Renaissance Inc, Prosthetic Effects Design – Mike Marino, Production Design – Alan Lampert. Production Company – Borderline Presents.
Cast
Christopher Abbott (Reed), Mia Wasikowska (Jackie), Laia Costa (Mona)
Plot
Reed has an overwhelming desire to stab his infant son with an ice-pick. He leaves his wife Mona, telling her he is going on a business trip and checks into a downtown hotel. There he plans to hire a prostitute, tie her up on the pretext of enacting a BDSM fantasy, and then stab her to death. The prostitute Jackie arrives but immediately goes into the bathroom and stabs herself in the leg. Reed is forced to take her to hospital and then back to her place where things go very differently than he planned.
Director Nicolas Pesce made an impressive debut with his first film The Eyes of My Mother (2016). Piercing was his second film, although failed to enjoy that same acclaim. Pesce subsequently went on to direct the US reboot of Ju-on/The Grudge franchise with The Grudge (2020), which flopped badly. Piercing is an adaptation of a 1994 novel by Japanese writer Ryu Murakami. Murakami is known for a series of novels that push quite an out-there edge. Several of these have been adapted to film, the best known of which was Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), while Murakami has also directed several of his own adaptations himself.
Piercing comes right between the two poles of Nicholas Pesce’s career (so far) – the standout and beautifully stylish The Eyes of My Mother and the flop of The Grudge, which may well have torpedoed his career. Certainly, Piercing swings more towards the indie sensibilities of the former than the commercially driven latter. On the other hand, it starts well but falters.
Pesce creates a fascinating background that seems to be all 1970s modernism. The film opens on pans across a cityscape designed in modernist deco architecture (all model work) – roundel windows, interiors with plastic telephones and subdued, very controlled lighting schemes. The soundtrack is often made up of muzak. Pesce quickly plunges into an area of Disturbed Psychology – it is not at all clear why Christopher Abbott wants to kill a woman. (In Murakami’s book, it is an alternative to the mewling of his baby son, although in the film his being driven crazy by such is only clear in the very first scene). We watch him going through a mime of rehearsing the murder, where the soundtrack provides spurting and crunching sound effects to accompany.
Would-be killer Christopher Abbott and disturbed prostitute Mia Wasikowska
His plans promptly get thrown awry with the arrival of Mia Wasikowska’s hooker whose first action upon arriving is to go into the bathroom and stab herself multiple times in the legs. Why she does so, like much of what she does throughout, we never find out. Christopher Abbott is then placed in the awkward position of going from making plans to kill her a few moments earlier to now finding himself having to bandage her up, calm her down and take her to the hospital.
While things start very promisingly during these sections, Piercing loses impetus once the two leave hospital and return to her place. Here the film is about two people waiting at a hospital, riding in a cab, going back to her apartment. The earlier scenes had unbearable underlying tensions – of waiting to see what was going to happen, whether he was going to kill her and then seeing her throw his plans into disarray – but these dissipate.
The latter scenes consist of Mia Wasikowska turning the table on Christopher Abbott, even doing an Audition on him at one point. However, the crucial failing of the film is that while he and his motivation are well defined, she remains a cipher. It’s a case of another mad pixie girl gone amok but who remains blank and unknown to us.
