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Review

John Duigan used to be something of an art house darling, with films like Romero and Wide Sargasso Sea. In Paranoid, he takes a stab toward genre material, although with a mind to take the pulp material more in the same direction of Roman Polanski’s suspense thrillers, especially Repulsion. There’s even a touch of Mario Bava’s Kill Baby Kill in the way bouncing white balls keep mysteriously appearing in scenes. He may have done better to take a lesson from less high minded material, as the B-movie crowd is often more able to produce cheap but effective thrills, and he often gets bogged down in the psychodrama. While Glen, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ewen Bremner and Hania Barton won’t make anyone forget the Sawyer clan from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they display some disturbing tics of their own. As for Alba, it’s difficult to tell whether she’s acting vacant to more fully embody the role of a shallow model, or if she’s just turning in a poor job.

 -- Brian Thomas