This genre hybrid opens on a dark, stormy night, takes a turn into a narrative maze only to dead end despite some promising kinks.
One of the attractions of contemporary puzzle movies — with their ambiguities and labyrinths, unreliable narrators and storytelling thickets — is that their complexities are by turns beguiling and confounding but also familiar. Life takes some navigating, and so do Christopher Nolan movies; capitalism is dehumanizing, just like in the Wachowskis’ “Matrix” series. The stories may be bummers, but at least you’ll have fun putting all their jagged pieces together or just savoring their inscrutable depths.
Sometimes, though, the mysteries prove unsatisfyingly murky, which is the case with the genre hybrid “Ultrasound.” A low-key science-fictiony puzzler, it opens in textbook fashion on a dark, stormy night with Glen (Vincent Kartheiser) motoring alone on a deserted road in the rain. When he drives over some nails, he abandons his car and seeks shelter in a nearby house. Uh-oh, you think, having seen a few movies. The people inside, Art (Bob Stephenson, the movie’s ace in the hole) and Cyndi (Chelsea Lopez), seem friendly, but so did Norman Bates. They also seem off-kilter, cagey, devious.
For his part, Glen looks wary, but because he’s a narrative cog rather than a character, he also makes a lot of seemingly foolish choices. He drinks too much with Art and then crawls into bed with Cyndi. You half expect Glen to end up hanging from a meat hook with an apple in his mouth. But he makes it home, and soon Art comes knocking and then so does Cyndi. Glen is pulled back into a busily plotted yet anemic story that involves a woman who may or may not be pregnant, a conservative politician, and some lab-coat types milling around a Cronenbergian research facility. There, things happen, mostly bad.
In time, the director, Rob Schroeder, and writer, Conor Stechschulte, introduce some undercooked ideas about surveillance, mind control and contemporary politics. (The movie is based on Stechschulte’s multivolume comic “Generous Bosom.”) More characters enter, notably a skittish researcher, Shannon (Breeda Wool), who plays an outsize role in the more focused second half. Working with a shoestring budget and actors of widely divergent abilities, Schroeder keeps things moving along while also managing the difficult task of creating and sustaining an atmosphere of suffocating unease.
There are some promising glints here and there, flashes of mordant wit and obvious ambition. But like too many movies, “Ultrasound” is better at setting up its story than delivering on its promise, as if the filmmakers were still pitching ideas in the elevator. The first hour or so consists of a series of enigmatic scenes that gesture — and keep gesturing — at the story’s larger mystery but don’t build to create a coherently integrated (and involving) whole. The results are frustrating and fragmentary. And while these pieces finally converge, by the time they do, the movie’s claustrophobia has become oppressive and you’re looking for the exit.
Ultrasound
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
