Piercing

Kinkiness and menace merge in Nicolas Pesce’s weird but ultimately unsatisfying adaptation of Ry­ū Murakami’s 1994 novel. The antihero is Reed (Christopher Abbott), who is introduced contemplating stabbing his infant daughter with an ice pick. The child tells him what he has to do to overcome the urge: take a trip to pick up a prostitute in another city and kill her savagely, thus working out his bloodlust, which will help stem past trauma. Reed checks into a hotel, orders a girl from an escort service, and nervously practices what he intends to do. But when Jackie (Mia Wasikowska) shows up, she proves to be no less needy—and in an equally unusual way. What transpires is a cat-and-mouse game that repeatedly shifts perspective and eventually winds up in Jackie’s apartment. Revealing the twists would be unfair, even though none are particularly surprising. More interesting are the choices that Reed and Jackie make: each could end their dance of death at any time, but they don’t, suggesting that the will to live is not uppermost in their minds. Pesce, however, is less interested in exploring their motives than in presenting an unsettlingly surrealistic portrait, sometimes grim and often funny, of the two circling one another like scorpions in a bottle. Abbott and Wasikowska are entirely in tune with this vision, but while Piercing maintains an air of dry, dark humor throughout, in the end it is pulled down by its own overwhelming nihilism. Still, this should be considered a strong optional purchase. (F. Swietek)