There’s a throb of claustrophobic panic and despair in this movie; something like something any of us might feel while at a modern art exhibition and for a long, long moment unable to find the exit. Maybe the movie itself aspires to the cool, affectless chill of an unimaginably expensive piece of contemporary art.
Documentary-maker Vasilis Katsoupis makes his fiction feature debut here , working on the script with British screenwriter Ben Hopkins. Willem Dafoe stars, as athletic and ascetic as ever, playing Nemo, an art thief who is breaking into an ultra-luxurious Manhattan apartment belonging to an art-collector plutocrat, filled with all his modern pieces. (There is a mention of this man being away in Kazakhstan and one of his pieces is a red canvas with a “Z” on it.) New York City is seen from stock footage and in projections beyond the plate glass, and in fact this obvious studio-based unreality is not inappropriate.
Dafoe’s thief is evidently working with an accomplice, in contact via a walkie-talkie, who guides him into the property, giving him tense instructions about security codes, etc. He is after some Egon Schiele paintings, but the self-portrait they wanted isn’t where they thought it would be; the thief starts looking around for it and it is perhaps this unplanned route variation which triggers a catastrophic security lockdown. The steel doors clang shut: the temperature control goes haywire.
Defoe’s accomplice abandons him and ignores his desperate yells into the walkie-talkie and now the thief is utterly alone: a postmodern Robinson Crusoe (or maybe Robert Maitland from JG Ballard’s Concrete Island) stranded in a world whose high-end luxury and all its art pieces (canvases and sculptures and video art installations ceaselessly and pointlessly playing into a special room) are instantly transformed into nonsense. (Or is it that their nonsense is now brutally, tactlessly revealed?) The thief has to scavenge what food scraps are left over in the fridge but he has to sip water from the timed-irrigation pipes for the plants. The lavatory is backed up and the thief is reduced to defecating in the hidden concrete bunker for super-special art pieces. But as he slowly goes crazy, the thief begins to obsess over a cleaner called Jasmine whom he can see with the still-working CCTV screen – and starts to see how he can escape.
This is a film which maybe spins its wheels in terms of a progression of narrative or, indeed, ideas. And there is the question of why the thief doesn’t have a smartphone on him; obviously he doesn’t use it at the beginning to make sure he is untraceable. But surely he would have one, turned off at first, for emergencies?
Well, this film is never dull and Dafoe has a martyred intensity and anchorite emaciation (I found myself thinking of his role as Scorsese’s Christ.) Perhaps the point is that super-rich art investment is already a sterile spiritual prison. Or perhaps Katsoupis and Hopkins are suggesting something else: that while humanity decays and dies like Dafoe’s hermit thief, art carries on, persisting in its callous way – and even offers a kind of escape. It is a strange, enclosed experience: Dafoe’s mastery of the screen keeps it meaningful.
• Inside screened at the Berlin film festival.
