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Jack (Chase Williamson) is a young and hopeful director, but his career is already on the fizzle before it has really begun, basically because nobody will let him direct a feature unless he has already gathered experience directing a feature, and he cannot gather the experience because he has never directed a feature - so he's in a perfect catch-22, and it's not made any better when his girlfriend Shantel (Evanne Friedman) releases her first novel to some acclaim. But then, out of nowhere appears producer Bob Moseby (Chris Browning), who hires him on the recommendation of actress Sarah (Nicole Alexandra Shipley) to direct a decently (if still low) budgeted movie with an actual professional crew, in an actual studio, with a workable script. Jack is way too excited to even assume there might be a catch, and day one of the shoot goes really great, also thanks to the lead actors of the film, Sarah, newcomer Damien (Victor Turpin), and veteran actress Nancy (Caroline Williams), who also happens to be Moseby's wife. But at the end of the day, Moseby reveals the catch of the whole thing to Jack, he in the very last scene of the shot, wants to have Damien killed for real - for publicity he claims at first. Basically, Moseby would arrange the kill, all Jack would have to do is to stand by, not interfere, and get it all on camera. Of course, Jack refuses, even if the film might be the break he has worked for for that long, but Moseby can be very persuasive - for one, he has murdered the original director of the movie and has forged enough evidence to handily pin it onto Jack, and he threatens he will kill everyone Jack loves if he doesn't play along. So basically, Jack can't go to the police, and he's pretty certain Moseby will kill people near and dear to him - which is why he even breaks up with Shantel. The next few days, Jack pretty much sleepwalks through the shoot, so much so that others start to wonder about his well-being, while trying to figure out how Moseby will have Damien killed, and soon he finds out the film's AD (Craig Stark) is Moseby's accomplice in this - only for the AD to turn up dead after Moseby has found out Jack found out. Jack tells his DP and best friend Sam (Shane Coffey) about the situation he's in, and the two try to find a way out of it - but the last day of shooting approaches rapidly, and it seems Moseby has planned the kill a little too well in advance for them to even stand a chance to prevent it ...

Now here's a thriller that's old-fashioned in the best of ways, as it doesn't give in to spectacle but stays on message building up suspense throughout, so there's little in terms of jump scares or gore (other than the gore of the film-within-a-film that's always identified as fake) and yet the movie remains tense throughout. And even if the actual premise might be a bit too far-fetched for 100% believability, the characters and their actions remain very much grounded in reality, and a grounded ensemble and the filmset backdrop do their bit in making everything relatable, all resulting in a very cool genre flick.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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