A radio show host is taken hostage and forced to confess to a past
incident live on air.
Directed by: Pedro C. Alonso
Starring: Eddie Marsan, Paul Anderson, Ivana
Baquero, Richard Brake, Anthony Head, Alana Boden
Over the last decade, a group of Spanish filmmakers - Nacho Vigalondo (Open Windows); Rodrigo Cortés (Buried); Jaume Collet-Serra (every Liam Neeson movie) - have revived the
thriller genre with varying degrees of success. Iberian filmmakers have
never been as concerned with narrative coherence as their more conventional
Anglo-Saxon counterparts, and so many of these new thrillers have defied
logic, trading on style over substance. Pedro C. Alonso's
preposterous feature debut, Feedback, continues this trend. It's a slickly shot single location thriller that
rarely makes an ounce of sense.
The always value for money Eddie Marsan brings his distinctive brand
of tightly wound malevolence to the lead role of Jarvis Dolan, a
venom-spitting shock jock London talk radio host who hypocritically calls
Brexit voters racists while spouting his own xenophobic conspiracy theories,
a sort of liberal Piers Morgan if you will. Dolan winds up his listeners so
much that he currently sports scars as a result of being abducted and beaten
up the previous weekend. Keen to cash in on the media attention this attack
has generated, station supremo Norman Burgess (Anthony Head) forces
Dolan to reluctantly team up for an on-air reunion with Andrew Wilde (Paul Anderson), his former co-host.
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After his opening monologue/rant, Dolan's studio is stormed by two masked
men who inform him that should he not follow their demands, they will kill
the show's producer, Anthony (Alexis Rodney), and intern, Claire (Ivana Barquero, unrecognisable from her most famous role as the young star of
Pan's Labyrinth). Live on-air, Dolan is forced to eke a confession from Wilde regarding
the details of "What happened in room 221?" following an awards show in
Belfast several years prior.
The nature of just what did happen in room 221, and Dolan's level of
complicity, is gradually revealed, and therein lies one of the film's
stumbling blocks. Alonso exploitatively hitches his film onto the #MeToo
movement, but neither Dolan nor his accusers are the sort of people we can
get behind. A stronger filmmaker might be able to manipulate us enough to
get us reluctantly on Dolan's side, the way Hitchcock so often made us
empathise for people we knew had done terrible things. But at least at this
stage of his career, Alonso is no Hitchcock, and Marsan's casting carries
its own baggage. The role of Dolan really should have gone to an actor less
associated with screen villainy.
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But the biggest hurdle for Feedback's audience to vault is the idea that Dolan's accusers could sustain their
plan for so long without any interference from the authorities. How they got
past the building's security in the first place is never addressed, nor is
the fact that a radio show could broadcast a series of confessions and
on-air atrocities to Europe's most populous city for 90 minutes without the
police knocking on the studio door to see if everything is okay.
Alonso's script, co-written with Alberto Marini, is a mess, but as a
director there's enough evidence to suggest that he might follow his Spanish
compatriots to Hollywood. Feedback's claustrophobic set-pieces are efficiently helmed, and along with
cinematographer Ángel Iguácel, Alonso manages to keep a movie
that is largely dialogue based visually interesting.
Feedback boasts an intriguing premise, but its succession of
head-scratching "why aren't the police kicking the doors in?" moments makes
it impossible to invest in its defiantly daft narrative.
Feedback is on Amazon Prime Video
UK/ROI now.
