Laced
Written and Directed by Kyle Butenhoff
Starring Dana Mackin, Hermione Lynch, Zach Tinker and Kyle Butenhoff
Running time: 1 hour and 38 minutes
Unrated
On VOD January 12

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Laced is a small crime drama with a simple premise, where things start bad and get worse, which is one of my favorite kinds of movie (or story, generally-- I think Scott Smith's A Simple Plan as good as tense, uncomfortable books get). Writers often mistake putting together an overly complex plot for creating an exciting one, like once an audience has lost track of a character's motivations, they'll think, "Wow, I must be having fun!" I loved where Laced started, and even if it lost me toward the middle, I appreciated how lean and surprising it remained.

The set-up, as established in the first act: A woman (Dana Mackin) is alone in a house, she gets a call from another person (Hermione Lynch) saying that her husband (Kyle Butenhoff) is almost home, he's drunk and to light a candle in the window when "it's done." The person on the other end of the line hangs up, the husband comes home. The woman poisons him, he doesn't die, she scrambles.

Great! In a few ways, Laced reminded me of Dan Berk and Robert Olsen's Body, but it also calls to mind so many films that take place in confined places–from noir gold The Petrified Forest to Rope to Ex Machina–not for their plots but for their efficiency. An economy of space means there are a limited number of places a person could hide a body or use to escape a conflict or even just be alone in, and I wish more filmmakers recognized that single locations can both keep a budget tight and serve the tension of their stories. This is especially true if, as in Laced, the camera moves around confidently–the location is static but we are not static within it. But even if this thing were shot like convenience store security camera footage, it's about a woman who wants to kill a man and a man who doesn't want to be killed and they're stuck in a house together. I don't need much more from you.

I feel okay revealing the husband doesn't die right away (it's in the film's log line). And I feel okay telling you more people show up (there are four names on the poster). Even knowing that, Laced does a great job with its bait and switch. As the man chokes on his poisoned food, the woman vents, cathartically telling him off in what most stories would treat as his final moments. And then he just lives. It's fun when a crime story goes wrong with a bang, when the bank teller hits the alarm and all the criminals freak out, but I liked even more that this one lingered, that the wife builds herself up to a moment that simply does not come, and that the husband doesn't recognize the danger he's in as much as he hobbles to the bathroom. Writer-director Butenhoff, also playing the poisoned husband, creates expectations for a heightened moment and pays them off not with a different kind of heightened moment but with a lack of energy, and it feels severe. I loved it.

The problems come after that moment. The next time the energy builds, things go off in directions that are harder to believe. A knife gets pulled out of nowhere, a new character recites crime scene clean-up tips with a tone and dialogue that accidentally lay out exactly where her arc is headed. One character who's supposed to be a monster doesn't successfully come off that way and a character who's supposed to be kind and understanding is tipped to be a cold killer. The film does not surprise you.

But I sure like those first thirty-or-so minutes.

This is going to sound like a backhanded compliment, but I'm not talking to the filmmakers here, I'm talking to you: Plenty of other movies have fumbled worse than Laced does. Movies have fallen apart in front of my eyes, have started saying one thing and lost track of their own themes so badly that they've ultimately said the opposite at the top of their lungs, have spread five good minutes over ninety mediocre ones. There is promise here. I would be living in a more interesting world if everything held this much promise. If Laced is the foundation on which a few people's careers will be built, I look forward to watching those careers progress.