The suburban dysfunction genre is a funny old thing – all the trappings of aspirational lifestyle mixed with a hearty dose of angst and some plain old hysterical dish-throwing doesn’t seem like obvious popcorn fodder to me. Look closer and I think you’ll find a kind of equivalent catharsis to hack-and-slash horror for the non-squeamish, where the fat and forty set get to vicariously smash out their comfortable existence for two air-conditioned hours before going home to review their pre-nups in a contented kind of solitude. The husband and wife playbook, from, well, Husbands and Wives, to Revolutionary Road, gives couples everywhere the capacity to virtually divorce so they don’t have to, in the same way that torture-porn advocates use the stuff to subdue their inner psycho, and fan-boys get to play Iron Man at the multiplexes without the complications of backyard robotics.

Well, anyway. Given those theorems, anyone who sees Alexandra’s Project more than once in their entire marriage has some serious dilemmas. The film, firmly part of this husband-wife-strife flick-pack, tends strongly towards the more black-hearted of its contemporaries, a punitively detached treatise of a Dear John premise for the technologically able, and near-insane.

The film centres around the titular Alexandra (Helen Buday), nominally a suburban housewife, seemingly via femme fatale and audio visual genius, and her husband, Steve (Gary Sweet) Their brand of inane suburbia is familiar, if not downright ordinary. Kids, jobs, a neighbour they poke fun at. And then there’s Steve’s birthday. Having been handed an empty house and a suggestive video by Alexandra, he settles in on for what he assumes is some VHS-quality onscreen naughty-wifery. And while it looks a lot like that to begin with, some serious subversion of VHS birthday messages as well as, y’know, the institution of marriage, is about to occur. As a note it broadly explains three things: a) she’s leaving him, b) he’s a lousy, cheating, no-goodnik, and c) she’s locked him in their house with only this VHS tape to watch and nary even a M*A*S*H rerun on community television.

Alexandra’s Project, from here, veers towards some pretty dark and interesting places. For a large part of its running time, the film simply involves a man sitting by himself, watching, of his own curiosity and compulsion, some disturbing home truths being revealed to him on a screen. The film, making diligent critical work of this setup, has a keen intellectual interest in the politics of power, gender roles, sexuality and inequality, as well as a similar interest in the act of displaced voyeurism and cinema spectatorship, in the same way as films like Rear Window or Funny Games also do.

As a pure thriller, it manages to sustain your attention in a setup on the fact of its hook – finding out the enigmatic contents of the tape. It has many things going against it in the effort to sustain narrative dynamism: it’s limited mostly to a single location, limited mostly to two actors, limited to an interaction based around forced passivity, of listening and reacting to the contents of the tape. But its limitations and challenges are consistently played to advantage, where small observations carry devastating weight; for instance, a devolution into a kind of sustained masochism as the remote control fast forward drops away and the need to know the worst overtakes it…

The film certainly can’t be recommended for all viewers, though. It never lets audiences off the hook, or cares much for their state of response as the story it’s telling, and how it’s telling it. As a character piece, it’s knowingly confronting, and seeks to unsettle those watching and keep unsettling them. It does this successfully; the film cleverly plays with your own sympathies of the true nature of the characters, as you’ve only come to know and judge them within a very narrow range of provocations, without the context or back story of their relationship to inform your sense of moral justification. Alexandra seems vindictively slutty, but has she been pushed over the edge by the Steve’s mistreatment? Steve in turn seems victimised and good-natured in a weak kind of way, so as protagonists and antagonists go, the lines are divisively blurry as to whether this is an act of revenge or unmitigated cruelty that we’re bearing witness to.

Alexandra’s feminist/post-feminist tract also seems to ultimately seek justification for her actions through that hoariest of all husband and wife clichés – the woman wronged through infidelity. If the story here had strengthened its resolve to be entirely a polemic against the trappings of toxic motherhood and homemaking, it would have been more interesting. To legitimate Alexandra’s actions with the easy-out card of the cheating husband only scales its claws back towards an amenable revenge flick of sorts.

Still, to the integrity of the story, it doesn’t end cleanly. At its darkest, this could be something David Cronenberg might veer towards. As a local production, despite the nominally argumentative trappings of said suburbanite genre, it’s a piece that takes its vicarious dissolution to some coldly, thoughtful extremes. But if you’re not quite up for that kind of marital apocalypse, it might be best to stick to the horror movies for now.

Review by Al Cossar

Director: Rolf de Heer
Screenwriter: Rolf de Heer
Cast: Gary Sweet, Helen Buday, Bogdan Koca