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Creep


Director: Patrick Brice (2014)
Starring: Patrick Brice, Mark Duplass
Find it: IMDB

Weird Asshole: The Movie. In Creep, a freelance cameraman is hired out via a Craigslist advertisement to document a day in the life of a terminally ill man. That said terminally ill man turns out to be an unhinged psychopath (and not terminally ill at all) should come as no surprise to anyone in this post-Catfish age: he did meet him on Craigslist, after all.

Being a movie about some guys who decide to stalk a little girl they met online.
But it's fine because two creepy wrongs make a totally not at all creepy right (plus TV show).

Not the Creep about the London underground, then, and nothing to do with Radiohead. Patrick Brice's found footage horror film is an effective, intelligent and, yeah, creepy depiction of male stalking and obsession. We can tell that there's something not quite right with Josef (Duplass) from the off, not the least his insistence that the first bit filmed for his little documentary (intended to be shown to his son after his death, like that Michael Keaton movie) is him whipping his undies off and crying in the bathtub. It's not long before Aaron (Brice) and ourselves come to the conclusion that Josef is, frankly, a bit of a creep.

To say much more would be to spoil the various twists and turns the film has up its sleeve. While it does nothing at all to alleviate the age old question we always end up asking during these movies, it's more tolerable than most, employing its jump scares in a manner that feel organic and in service to the story. Duplass is tremendous as Josef - although we never really feel threatened by him like we should, we can't quite tell what the character might be capable of either. That lends the story a great sense of unpredictability and one particularly excellent bit of bait-and-switch. It's darkly funny too, which is always preferable to the dour misery of Paranormal Activity or relentless trauma headaches of its screaming imitators.

In spite of its subgenre trappings and the over-saturation of the market with films like it, I had a blast with Creep. If I may be predictable for a moment - it's special. So fucking special.

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