MOVIE REVIEW : Low Aim of ‘Mute Witness’ Overshadows Nervy Style

“Mute Witness” is an ingenious but exceedingly savage and protracted lady-in-distress thriller that benefits considerably from its key setting, Moscow’s vast, seedy old Mosfilm Studios complex. For all its nervy style, it aims steadfastly at the lowest common denominator among exploitation picture audiences.

Billy (Marina Sudina), a mute special-effects makeup artist working on a low-budget American production for an understandably self-absorbed young director (Evan Richards), inadvertently becomes locked in the immense, maze-like sound stage and its surrounding structure. To her horror she witnesses a couple of Russian members of the crew shoot a snuff film--a particularly gory sequence involving sex. Once her presence is detected by these villains, the cat-and-mouse pursuit is on full force.

Writer-director Anthony Waller unfailingly comes up with one gimmick after another to keep Billy and eventually the director and the director’s spunky girlfriend (Fay Ripley), who is also Billy’s sister, in constant danger, but after awhile the suspense becomes increasingly credibility-defying and mechanical. Meanwhile, the brutality increases, and the overall effect is one of growing morbidity, despite Waller’s broad strokes of comic relief.

In fairness, Waller does pack a few jolts for thrill-seekers, mainly early on before the film becomes such a wearying blood bath, and he shrewdly keys into the gangsterism currently plaguing the former Soviet Union. The film’s strongest asset by far is Egon Werdin’s fluid and strikingly lit cinematography.

* MPAA rating: R, for violence and a strong scene, combining sex and violence. Times guidelines: The film is thoroughly unsuitable for preteens.

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‘Mute Witness’

Marina Sudina: Billy

Fay Ripley: Kay

Evan Richards: Andy

Oleg Jankowskij: Larsen

A Sony Pictures Classics presentation. Writer-director Anthony Waller. Producers Alexander Buchman, Norbert Soentjen, Waller. Executive producer Richard Claus. Cinematographer Egon Werdin. Editor Peter Adam. Music Wilbert Hirsch. Production designer Matthias Kammermeier. Art director Barbara Becker. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.