By Simon Thompson
Director Jason Zink and writer Nolan Mihail’s Looky-Loo is a properly down and nasty almost cinema-verité-like piece of horror, which, despite its well-crafted atmosphere and effective sound design, still sadly left me feeling a little flat. This is a shame because Looky-Loo is a movie which has a lot going for it- and despite its small budget it is an incredibly polished movie from a visual standpoint.
The plot of Looky-Loo follows an aspiring director only named as Looky-Loo (Jason Zink), whose obsession with the craft of filmmaking leads him into a monstrous crime-spree. At first his crimes start off at the level of voyeurism and stalking, but as he continues to use his camera they escalate to much, much worse. As the narrative goes on Looky-Loo becomes infatuated with a young woman named Courtney ( Courtney Gray), who he believes has the qualities he’s looking for in a star for his magnum opus.
Looky Loo’s main strength is in its sound design by Casey Synesael. Synesael manages to combine the sounds of the protagonist’s nervous heavy breathing and the non-diegetic sound of the movie’s locations into an atmosphere so tense that you could cut it with a knife.
Looky Loo is a movie which wears its influences like a badge of honour. The permanent first person point of view that the movie is filmed in is strongly reminding of a Fulci or Argento giallo film, especially in how Looky Loo’s hands are framed in the killing sequences. The realistic and documentarian style also gave me strong flashbacks to Remy Belvaux’s Man Bites Dog, with the juxtaposition of mundane every-day environments and jarring murders being a defining feature of both films.
The problem is that unlike films such as Hitchcock’s Psycho, Nightcrawler, Man Bites Dog, 8 MM, or Deep Red we don’t really gain a deeper understanding of Looky-Loo as a character. Within Nolan Mihail’s script we know the how of what he’s doing and we understand that he is a murderous psychotic obsessive, but we don’t understand why he is because he as no dialogue, just breathing, and we aren’t given any kind of flashback to his past to explain what caused him to go out and murder people.
To conclude, despite Casey Synesael’s brilliant sound design and strong camerawork by director Jason Zink, Looky Loo is a movie which could have benefitted greatly from a longer running time and a stronger characterisation of its protagonist. It’s these two factors which keep Looky-Loo trapped in being just a good horror movie and not a great one -despite Jason Zink’s skill and competence as a director.
Bloody Flicks 