Alone (2001)

A subjective camera stalker gets close to a succession of single women, obsessing over them and causing their deaths. On the case is a veteran policeman (John Shrapnel) and his callow female apprentice (Isobel Brook), who determine that the culprit is likely to be one of the client's of a psychiatric caseworker (Miriam Margoyles) who won't open up her files even when her own assistant (Laurel Holloman) barely survives an encounter with the killer, 'Alex'. The police lay an unlikely trap for the psychopath in a darkened, apparently deserted hospital and the familiar menace-attack-escape-and-gasp business is played out.

Alone opens as if it were a serious if not sombre study of urban alienation, contrasting the obsessive Alex (who keeps a record of the hours and minutes spent asleep and has Peeping Tom-like miserable childhood flashbacks) with victims and pursuers who are only marginally less lonely. However, its gradual reliance on standard psycho plotting – down to a twist ending that reveals something about the killer which hardly seemed ambiguous all along – turns it into a reasonably suspenseful if fundamentally ordinary horror thriller.

Debuting director Phil Claydon has an X-Files-ish fondness for sequences in which characters don't bother to turn the lights on, having his cops and killer prowl through the victims' flats and other crime scenes in an eerie blue light. A good cast of British character players and well-written dialogue scenes keep the film engaging even between obvious set-pieces, though there are a few too many borrowings from the DePalma and Carpenter sketch-books as the camera pursues Holloway through an apartment or down a hospital corridor and Shrapnel looks out of the window he has just shoved the killer through to find that the body has vanished.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com