It is rarely that you watch an English film and get reminded of a plot point from our cinema. That’s exactly what I felt when Netflix’s latest whodunit, Reptile, begins explaining the crime that occurs in it and who the perpetrator is. Did the writers Grant Singer, Benjamin Brewer, and Benicio Del Toro watch the Tamil blockbuster, Vikram Vedha, which was remade in Hindi recently—or was this all just a coincidence? And yet, director Grant treats the gruesome murder of a young real estate agent and the investigation that follows, with a lot of thought and weaves a solid noir film, out of a simple crime thriller.
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Alicia Silverstone, Justin Timberlake, Eric Bogosian
Director: Grant Singer
Streaming on: Netflix
Reptile begins by introducing Will Grady (Justin Timberlake) and his girlfriend Summer Elswick (Matilda Lutz) as real estate agents, who don’t always follow the rules to gain profits. With Summer found dead in one of those houses, a world-weary detective Tom Nichols (a terrific Benicio del Toro) walks in to investigate the case. He has a few skeletons in his closet—naturally, and some of them aren’t necessarily his. As the case unravels, Tom comes to terms with his own love-hate affair with his profession and becomes disillusioned with the system.
Initially, the film’s deliberate pacing works in favour of the film as the narrative establishes all the players of this investigative thriller. We see Tom’s friends, who help him rehabilitate his life in Maine after being at the centre of a controversy in Philadelphia. We see Tom’s beautiful relationship with his wife Judy (Alicia Silverstone), which has its share of pitfalls that result in a chillingly effective scene in a pub in the final act. We also see Tom’s sleuthing abilities, which might not be from the Sherlockian school of deduction but is straight out of the playbook of a hardened cop joining the dots gradually and effectively. However, the film doesn’t really hold its ground when the final unravelling happens because it becomes something completely different from what it started out to be. After a point, we aren’t really concerned about who killed Summer because the film becomes all about Tom, and it isn’t really as interesting as the makers believe it to be.
Finally, when we are given answers to questions that we didn’t even ask, we understand that Reptile was always about Tom. The murder was just an afterthought and a way to explore the psyche of Tom. While this does work intermittently, Reptile fails to turn up the sinisterness of it all and ends up whipping up a promising tale that ends up with reasonable, even if not fantastic, results.
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