tlavideo.com

Review

Courteney Cox stars as Sophie Jacobs, an edgy, addled photographer, in a gritty, but overwrought psychodrama revolving around the murder of her boyfriend and her life thereafter. The ambitious independent draws its influences from rich sources such as Hitchcock’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Christopher Nolan’s amnesiac mindbender, Memento, but fails to deliver on its promise as a nonlinear romance laced with doubts about what might have been. November reconstructs the day of her boyfriend’s murder, taking us down a psychological rabbit hole as Sophie deals with her loss.

As Sophie attempts to piece her life back together, she relives the day of her boyfriend’s death repeatedly, scrutinizing herself and her actions, peering into her photos for clues that may help solve his murder. Motivated by nostalgia and regret, she returns to the convenience store where the shooting took place in the hopes of unveiling something to aid the police in their investigation. What unravels is an exploration of Sophie’s psyche as she paces through her otherwise mundane day, tormented by nightmare logic imbued with recriminations and remorse. Unfortunately, the sequence of events proves entirely too predictable and successive iterations leave us wondering if November was initially conceived as “CSI: Groundhog Day.”

Shot on film and handheld digital video, November expresses the tense, frightening trauma of Se7en, Pi and Run Lola Run through use of scratched, bleached and overexposed film stock. Relying on quick cuts, abstracted images and objects, director Greg Harrison creates a mood of dissonance and unease from the minutiae of everyday life, conferring on the film the agitating aesthetics commonplace among too many self-conscious indies.

 -- J.T. Ramsay