As most of you will already know, Jonathan Liebesman’s psychological thriller The Killing Room, in which Chloë stars as behavioral analysis expert Emily Reilly opposite Peter Stormare, Nick Cannon, Timothy Hutton and Clea DuVall, premiered yesterday at the ongoing Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT. The first reviews are already trickling in online, and they are coming in rather mixed, albeit generally favorable.
While the most notably negative review came from Variety, it is also thus far the only film site to have expressed outright disdain for the film, whereas other sources have remained positive on the film and it’s potential as a commercial success. HitFlix also mentions Chloë’s performance, of which they remained appreciative, if not excited. Check out some excerpts from posted reviews below:
From HitFlix.com:
The Killing Room doesn’t leaven the punches with anything like a light moment, it’s tougher going. The acting is solid from everyone, with Hutton proving to be the real stand-out. It’s nice to see Sevigny playing a lead, and she’s absolutley up for the challenge. She’s the one who is supposedly the audience’s sympathetic entry point, so several of the choices she makes really push the audience. What would you do? Would you make the choices she does? And even if you wouldn’t, can you understand why she does?
From Variety.com:
As a conscience-plagued torturer-in-training whose own reactions are being tested by the murderous Dr. Phillips (Peter Stormare), Chloe Sevigny is forced to play out repetitive emotions that can be guessed from Liebesman’s first scene. Twenty minutes in, The Killing Room administers a promisingly nasty shock that the film’s remainder can’t sustain. Opening titles’ pretentious reference to the Rockefeller Commission, a Nixon-era mind-control lab, hardly help place the dated premise in the here and now.
From ScreenDaily.com:
Though superficially similar to the Saw films, The Killing Room has a sickening elegance that’s entirely its own design. Working with cinematographer Lukas Ettlin, production designer Charisse Cardenas and composer Brian Tyler, director Jonathan Liebesman has constructed a claustrophobic, riveting thriller built almost entirely out of scenes of the volunteers trapped in a sealed white room debating how they can outsmart their captors as the threat of their deaths hangs in the air.
From LATimes.com:
As are comparisons to another Sundance Midnight movie — Saw. While Saw relied on torturous scenes of gore and gristle to race hearts, Killing Room does its best to up the psychological ante and it’s the actors’ capable performances that carry the film. Some horror aficionados might think that the dialogue-driven film doesn’t go far enough to scare, but the movie’s post-9/11 political themes make it less derivative and more of an honest attempt at genre elevation. It’s no Blair Witch, but The Killing Room could very well find a smaller theatrical distributor.
