Exposed (2016)

Exposed arrives as two films wrestling inside one distribution plan. One is a moody police procedural in which Keanu Reeves investigates the death of a corrupt partner and the pension arithmetic that keeps an entire precinct quiet. The other is a surreal bilingual drama about a young Latina woman named Isabel, her visions of angels, and the suppressed memory of a sexual assault she answered with violence. The seams show. Lionsgate reportedly bought a cop thriller and received something closer to a Pan's Labyrinth-inflected trauma narrative, so they recut it, and the director asked that his name be removed. The result plays like a film interrupted mid-sentence.

The cultural ledger here is modest but not empty. Ana de Armas carries the emotional weight, and the supporting ensemble is largely Latino, which registers as representation without any accompanying sermon. The trauma at the center, a rape, a killing, a buried memory, gestures toward a feminist reading of violence against women, though the studio edit subordinates that material to a corruption mystery. The original cut reportedly engaged mass incarceration and state violence committed under color of authority, and almost none of that survives. The remainder is atmosphere, upper Manhattan locations, and a plot that resists comprehension.

Nothing here lectures. There is no climate allegory, no body-positivity subplot, no anti-capitalist framing beyond the usual rot inside a police precinct. The film's social instincts, whatever they once were, have been folded into a thriller that scores 8 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and deserves most of it. A fascinating artifact of studio interference. A tedious one to sit through.