Sliver [Phillip Noyce, 1993]:
I've often felt there was a fine line between Hollywood's cycle of 1990s erotic thrillers and Italy's cycle of 1970s giallo movies, which might explain why I'm so fascinated by the sub-genre of films like Shattered (1991), Basic Instinct (1992), Final Analysis (1992), Striking Distance (1993), Color of Night (1994) and Jade (1995). These films, many of them critically derided, have a surface of contemporary Hitchcockian mystery, but are more often closer in tone to the lurid, psychosexual thrills of films like A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971), Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), Death Walks on High Heels (1971), Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972), The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974) and Deep Red (1975), among others.
For all the Hitchcockian pretentions on voyeurism and dehumanisation present in this slick thriller from director Phillip Noyce and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, this psycho-killer loose in a modern high-rise movie is much closer to The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972) than it is to Rear Window (1954). Sharon Stone, an icon of this particular sub-genre of films and an underrated actor in her own right, is an engaging presence as the protagonist, Carly Norris, a successful, thirtysomething career woman who takes on a luxury apartment where the last tenant, an apparent doppelgänger for Carly, allegedly committed suicide.
Sliver [Phillip Noyce, 1993]:
There are shades of Roman Polanski here, specifically The Tenant (1976), though the connection might rest with Ira Levin, who as well as writing the book that Sliver is based on, also wrote the source material for the Polanski directed Rosemary's Baby (1968). Noyce's direction is stylish in a sleek, typically 90s manner, accentuating the bland and empty surfaces of these modern apartments and the disconnect between tenants (where their lives play out on fuzzy black and white video monitors as entertainment for a potentially voyeuristic killer.)
Sliver hits a lot of the right notes for this kind of film, which is well made on a technical level, but it's undoubtedly flawed by the fatal miscasting of both the male leads, as well as the fact that the motivations of the characters are dully predictable. Essentially, Noyce's film lacks a compelling enough hook to give weight to its scenes of surveillance and investigation. That it toys with the self-reflexive relationship between the viewer and the viewed is interesting, but there needed to be more of an emotional connection with the character and a stronger sense of mystery to draw the audience in. When you have a murder mystery where the identity of the killer becomes obvious from the first scene, and there is no misdirection or red herrings to provide a distraction, then the result is something that feels very plodding and predictable.
