MOVIE REVIEW

By Robert Abele

Her debut provocation, 1993's "Boxing Helena," revealed the limits of artistic heredity, and now director Jennifer Lynch -- daughter of David -- has returned with the prankish, ultra-violent hell ride "Surveillance." But, again, her quest to unnerve feels forced.

In Lynch's and co-screenwriter Kent Harper's "Rashomon"-inspired scenario, a series of brutal slayings along a stretch of empty highway draws a pair of dark-suited federal investigators (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) to a law enforcement outpost. There they separate three surviving witnesses -- a bloodied and petulant cop (co-writer Harper), a sharp-tongued junkie (Pell James) whose boyfriend was killed and an observant little girl (Ryan Simpkins) who lost her entire family -- in order to piece together what happened.

ADVERTISEMENT

Lynch directs her cast for maximum eccentricity, which in Pullman's case feels natural -- he can make any line-reading sound like the mask for a dirty thought -- but in other cast members (Ormond, Harper and French Stewart as a bad cop) edges toward overacting.

At the end, all is horrifically explained, the body count inflates, yet hardly anything makes sense. In Papa Lynch's films, little is explained, yet because he's so gifted at mining our deepest fears and scariest desires, logic is excused.

"Surveillance," which Dad executive-produced, shows that Jennifer Lynch is not without skill when it comes to solo flurries of outré humor and snap tension. But this lost highway saga has a bend in the road you can see a mile ahead and a turgidly blasé attitude toward carnage (deaths vary from being punch lines to perverse tragedies) that only reinforces the sense that instead of sifting through a nightmare, you're just enduring game pieces being moved around.

calendar@latimes.com