"Who are we when we don't think anyone's watching?" That's director Adam Rifkin on Look, his clever, misanthropic new film, shot entirely on surveillance cameras. But the real question might be "Who does Adam Rifkin, the director of Detroit Rock City, think we are when nobody's watching?" and the answer is a bunch of farting, drunk, murderous, teenager-fucking louts. In some ways, the dirty-minded Rifkin is the perfect director for an audience-implicating mediation on voyeurism. He opens with two teenagers stripping in a dressing room and gets more prurient from there. About twenty percent of the runtime is consumed with back-room humping. Chances are, you'll be implicated somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, Rifkin's not a very meditative type, and never deepens the implications of his format, rendering it, ultimately, a gimmick.
The cameras show us plenty of tits, but one thing we never get is a sense of invasion, since the characters are mostly unsympathetic. Rifkin might call the world he draws here a heightened reality, but it's really a lessened reality, where every character is reduced to an ironic victim of fate. The child whose parents spy on their nanny gets abducted at the mall; the sinister package the dark-skinned man leaves on the bus turns out to be full of algebra textbooks. (On a tangential note, I found Juno overwritten, but Look contains one of the meanest portrayals of teenage girls in recent memory, and made me feel that any movie depicting teenage girls as intelligent and sympathetic deserved some critical love.) Generally, one feels less a sympathy for the spied-upon than a sense that these people should be watched carefully at all times. This actually makes for a pretty entertaining hundred minutes, but as far as thematic resonance, it's a bust. — Peter Smith