A young, beautiful stranger rolls into town. The
town’s preeminent loner becomes enraptured. Horrible things happen.
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| Photo credit: Josie/IMDb |
Eric England’s Josie has the ingredients
for a strong feel-bad thriller, the kind that William Friedkin makes. But
unlike Friedkin’s The French Connection or the more recent Killer Joe,
Josie lacks the instinct to go for the throat, to really wander through
the wilderness of the human psyche’s penchant for evil. It wants to play in the
“icky premise” sandbox—a middle-aged high school security guard with a
mysterious past (Dylan McDermott) falls for the equally mysterious new girl
(Sophie Turner) at school—but it doesn’t want to go all the way with it. And
yet, that desire to let its characters off the hook through a series of
“gotcha” twists makes the situation even ickier because it walks up to the edge
of apologizing for a pedophile’s urges.
England’s reluctance to really dig into the
ugliness at the heart of its protagonist, Hank (McDermott), is also apparent in
the craft of the film. Working with editor Paul Matthew Gordon, England removes
the edge from too many scenes, always too eager to cut to comic relief or
“Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as you think” reassurances. When Hank peers from
his ratty motel patio to stare at Josie tanning like Lolita by the complex’s
pool, cinematographer Zoe White shoots it like Psycho’s iconic peering-through-the-peephole shot—it’s unnerving, it’s prurient, it’s gross and thrilling all
at once in that way only a voyeuristic film can be. But because Hank has turned
the patio into a makeshift zoo for his pet tortoises, England and Gordon cut
away from the supercharged psychosexual discomfort to focus on a quirk.
This urge to sanitize, to sand off rough edges
for 90 percent of the film, makes Josie feel foggy, like it’s a
fourth-generation video tape of something you remember as being much better
long ago. It’s nostalgic for an imagined time when it was more okay for movies
to jolt a viewer out of their comfort zone to face head-on the repulsiveness of
humanity’s underbelly, but it’s too self-conscious to indulge in the same shock
tactics.
The casting has a similar halfway there feeling
to it. McDermott plays the Matthew McConaughey character, but he’s either
unwilling or unable to get truly sinister the way McConaughey could. McDermott
imbues Hank with a wounded-puppy demeanor, all so nobody watching in the
theater squirms too much as he leers at a girl who could be his daughter. He’s
quiet and keeps to himself the way creeps tend to do, but his hinted-at tragic
backstory and his resolve to be a better man give his lecherous proclivities
the air of, “I’m only joking!” He wants to be good, and the movie wants
him to be good, so it gives him a pass for his continual “courting” of Josie
because he’s sad or something. McDermott is never bad, merely workmanlike in
the role, serviceable with a dead-eyed stare and a menacing southern drawl, but
he never brings the malevolent magnetism the role requires to take it to the
next level.
Turner, on the other hand, is a hoot. She
actually has fun in her role. She plays things coy, never giving the same
answer twice to the question, “Where are your parents?” It’s a legitimate thing
to ask of a high schooler who moves on her own to a seedy motel in the middle
of Florida. With her big sunglasses and her swimsuits, she displays a canny
ability to get the people around her to do what she wants. She keeps her cards
close to her vest, toying with everyone, and in so doing gives Josie the
rah-rah momentum of a revenge picture.
But revenge isn’t the most compelling aspect of Josie,
no matter how badly the movie wants it to be. It has every opportunity to spin
a tale about unhealthy obsession, exploitation of the young, and loneliness. It
even begins to go down that road at times. Then it cuts to tortoises racing
each other because it can’t face genuine human monstrousness.
Director: Eric England
Writer: Anthony Ragnone II
Starring: Sophie Turner, Dylan McDermott, Jack
Kilmer, Kurt Fuller, Robin Bartlett
Available in limited release and on demand now
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