Twisted (2004)

Twisted arrives from 2004, a year when the psychological thriller still believed that a yawara stick and a bottle of rohypnol constituted a third act. Philip Kaufman, a director of real pedigree, presides over a San Francisco potboiler in which Ashley Judd plays Inspector Jessica Shepard, newly promoted to homicide, whose former lovers keep turning up dead. Critics hated it with a unanimity rarely achieved. Ninety-seven percent of them voted no. The film then failed to earn back its budget. For our purposes this is a barren specimen. Almost nothing here is attempting to instruct anyone in anything, which in this line of work passes for a quiet afternoon.

There is a woman at the center of the picture, and she is a detective rather than a victim, at least until the plot decides otherwise. Shepard drinks, she sleeps around, and the film treats her appetite as the engine of her danger. That is not a thesis. It is a hangover from an older genre. The supporting cast is notably mixed for a 2004 studio procedural: Samuel L. Jackson as her foster father and captain, Russell Wong and Richard T. Jones as officers, Camryn Manheim as the pathologist. Nobody remarks on any of it. That is casting, not commentary, and the distinction matters to the ledger. Race never becomes a subject. Neither does class, nor climate, nor the body as anything but a conventional object of desire. The blackouts are the machinery of addiction and trauma, not an interior landscape to be honored.

So we are left with a film that sermonizes not at all. It exists to deliver a twist, and it delivers one, dutifully, at a dock, in the rain. Kaufman has made a pulpy, widely mocked whodunit with a straight face, and the straight face is all it has. There is nothing to lecture us about and nobody bothering to try. In a season of films that arrive carrying placards, this one arrives carrying a yawara. The scorecard stays nearly blank. The film, it seems, would not have wanted it any other way.