By: admin Category: FILM Date: 1.Jan.2012

If his first two features, 2004’s Buy It Now and 2008’s Afterschool, hinted at anything, it was a peculiar fascination with the anatomy of cyber interactions and the dark underbelly of living your public life… virtually.

Antonio Campos, the director, garnered attention for his razor-sharp cinematic exposes which straddled the sometime disquieting line between reality and fiction in the context of online communication, with Buy It Now – a story in which a 16-year old girl sells her virginity on eBay – winning the Cinefondation award at Cannes and its follow-up, Afterschool, earning a slew of award nods.

Now, Campos is shifting gears. His Sundance offering, a neo-noir titled Simon Killer, sees Campos remain within the realm of the youth subculture, but shift – both geographically and thematically – his narrative purpose. Simon Killer tells the story of a young New Yorker who moves to Paris following a bad breakup. There, he falls for a young prostitute and what ensues is a dark, revelatory journey where nothing ends up being quite what it at first seems. The film stars Brady Corbet (pictured), a festival alumn you might remember from last year’s Sundance runaway hit Martha Marcy May Marlene (little coincidence, then, that the same production company worked on both films).

You might hear Simon Killer described as Campos’ second – not third – full length feature, owing to the debut of Buy It Now as a short that was, only for theatrical release, extended to its modest 62-minute runtime. Nevertheless, all three films share Campos’ penchant for telling stories that, even with their narrative veneer peeled off, never quite fully undress, retaining instead an eerie is-it-or-isn’t-it undertone that remains long after the credits have rolled shut.

Simon Killer premieres at next January’s Sundance Film Festival, where the movie will screen in Dramatic competition.