When it comes to seeing movies, people like to know what they’re going into. Films with low CinemaScores tend to be where the marketing did not match up with the actual film, so something like Killing Them Softly, which is sold as an action film, gets an “F” because it’s actually about the decline of America and how in an economic crisis even hitmen can’t get paid. By the metric of what’s being sold and what the film actually is, I imagine most people will hate Steven Knight’s new movie, Serenity. What’s being sold as a sultry thriller is only what’s on the surface of a movie with an absolutely bonkers twist. Even if you see the twist coming, you won’t believe that Knight actually went for, and it pays off for a film that’s far more memorable than a B-movie tale of sex and murder.
Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) is a fisherman living on the island of Plymouth where he’s always broke as he tries to catch a big tuna that consumes his every waking hour. Baker is content to try and catch the big fish every day until his ex-wife, Karen (Anne Hathaway), strolls back into his life with a proposition. Her new husband, Frank (Jason Clarke), is physically abusive to both her and Patrick (Rafael Sayegh), the son she had with Baker back when he went by his real name, John. Karen offers to pay Baker $10 million in cash if he takes Frank out on his boat, kills him, and feeds him to the sharks. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure (Jeremy Strong), keeps trying to track Baker down for an important conversation.
For the first two-thirds of Serenity, the film is kind of baffling. It’s tough to understand what’s happening because its banality seems to be covering up something more complicated and engaging, and you want to peek behind the curtain. You watch Oscar-winners McConaughey and Hathaway exchange reheated dialogue from Body Heat and you wonder why two A-list actors would star in what appears to be a Skinemax movie. Nothing seems to make a lot of sense in terms of the tone, and you’re constantly wondering what Strong’s character is up to.
I made a guess early on (about twenty minutes into the movie) about what the twist could be, and I turned out to be right. But I wouldn’t call Serenity predictable because I was stunned that Knight actually went for it. The twist is stunningly audacious and the kind of swing for the fences where I have to respect the ambition involved. For some people, the twist won’t work and it will render a film where they had already checked out as unsalvageable. And I’ll admit that the twist doesn’t work completely because it forces you to reevaluate things that no longer make sense in the new context. But overall, I think the twist serves the movie well and gives Serenity a heart where before there was only tired clichés.
In order to explain why I like the movie, I’m going to have to reveal the twist because talking around it is both a disservice to the film and to you, the reader. If you want to go in cold—and you absolutely should before anyone spoils this movie for you—please stop reading now, and come back after you see Serenity. Even if you don’t like the movie, I think you’ll at least admire its gall.
Spoilers ahead. Final warning.
The twist is that everything in Serenity is a video game created by Patrick. You can put it together early on when you note that the first shot of the film is zooming into Patrick’s eye (telling us that this is in his mind) and then about twenty minutes in when we learn that Patrick spends most of his day playing a video game on his computer about fishing. It turns out that the video game is something Patrick coded himself and it’s a way to connect to the father he lost, Baker, who in reality died in the Iraq War. The game also functions as an escape from his abusive home life with Frank, who beats him and Karen. The game changes when Patrick changes his focus from wanting to just fish “with” his dad to having his dad murder Frank in the game, which correlates to Patrick considering if he too should kill Frank in order to protect Karen in the real world.
The way films are presented to us matters. It would be nice if there was no packaging and no box and you saw everything without any frame of reference, but it’s almost always there. Serenity presents itself as a sultry thriller and instead it’s far closer to an episode Black Mirror. And if Serenity had been an episode of Black Mirror, no one would have a batted an eye, because we know that every episode is dark, twisted, and has some relationship to technology. As good as an episode like “San Junipero” is, we watch it not believing that it takes place in the 1980s but waiting for the other shoe to drop. Serenity is deeply reluctant to let us even know there are shoes.
Within this framework of “the film is a video game in the mind of a traumatized teenager”, not everything works. Because this is now in Patrick’s imagination, you have to accept that Patrick is writing scenes where the avatar for his dad is having sex with a hot older woman (Diane Lane) for money and later having rough-then-tender sex with Karen. You have to assume that Patrick really loves Body Heat, Double Indemnity, and trashy Cinemax movies, which, for a teenage boy, isn’t out of the realm of possibility. You also have to assume that a teenage boy would invest his energy into building a deeply detailed fishing game, which, given the popularity of games like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing, and Stardew Valley, again, isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
I assume the “video game” aspect of everything will catch some people off guard, but for me, it makes sense. If Patrick had been writing a novel about his father, perhaps the twist would be more “reasonable”, but it makes more sense for it to be a video game. Video games are the storytelling medium for a new generation, and when you factor in the nature of choice and motivation that games present, it makes a lot of sense for Serenity to be a video game. It’s also clear, with Strong’s character working for a company called “Fontaine” and the film wrestling with the nature of choice and compulsion, that Knight has most likely played Bioshock, so he’s not ignorant of the medium.
When you look at Serenity through the eyes of Patrick, it becomes a far more interesting, and far sadder movie. It’s about a son who never got to know his father, is now stuck with a man who beats him and his mother, and has to create a fantasy world where someone will come save him. For me, that’s far more compelling than “Will a grizzled fisherman kill his ex-wife’s abusive husband for $10 million?” That story is fine for what it is, but Knight chose to do something big and bold by using that thin story as a springboard for something more in line with science fiction than pulp fiction. I didn’t go into Serenity expecting a film where Matthew McConaughey questions the nature of his reality, but I’m glad that I got it even if it can be messy and nuts on the way there.
Rating: B+
