This straight-to-Netflix murder procedural involves several creeps, a blond ex-cheerleader victim and another character who resembles her, a gravel-y voiced investigator and a detective squad seemingly imported from the Baltimore PD circa The Wire. Also: square dancing, an egregious amount of ominous music, and several backyard pools, none of which are used for swimming — all in an affluent but generic McMansion-filled suburban milieu. (The town is called Scarbourough, and the accents are eastern U.S., so perhaps this is meant to suggest by implication the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale.)
The film starts off with a salesman preparing to speak to an audience, one of those cringeworthy how-to-be-successful seminars held in hotel conference rooms. Will Grady (Justin Timberlake, in an intriguing dramatic turn as a victim/villain) is practicing his spiel in a mirror while being coached by an older woman who turns out to be his mother (Frances Fisher). But Grady is not the movie’s main character and his sales seminars — never mentioned again — turn out not to be important to the plot.
Grady’s Realtor girlfriend-cum-fiancé, Summer (Matilda Lutz), is showing one of the McMansions when she is brutally murdered. The number and force of her wounds suggests she was killed by a boyfriend or someone else close to her, so Grady is an immediate suspect, but so is a creepy, slinking character named Eli (Michael Pitt, a familiar thriller actor), who skulks around so much he might as well be named Igor. Eli has a historical beef with the Grady family, and therefore a motive. Then there’s the 13kg haul of heroin that disappears and reappears, just to provide a non-suburban thread and make things even more complicated.
Investigating it all is Detective Tom Nichols of the Scarborough PD, played with grim gravitas by Benecio Del Toro (he gets a cowriting credit with first-time director Grant Singer). Nichols has an older partner and a younger one, played by Eric Bogosian and Ato Essandoh respectively, as well as a boss (Domenick Lombardozzi, the bald detective Carver from The Wire, here playing an identical character, if a bigger asshole).
Even Nichols has a complicating factor. He left the police force in another city under a cloud of scandal. But while his fellow detectives often remind him and each other of this fact, it never becomes significant in the story. For the next ninety minutes, we’re in a procedural, punctuated by artificially generated suspense and the occasional death.
Finally Nichols, and the audience, piece together a criminal conspiracy involving all these elements (real estate, heroin traficking, asshole cops) as well as a significant percentage of the film’s characters. The finest bit of the film is Alicia Silverstone as Judy, Nichols’ wife, who acts as a sounding board for his theories, comes up with a few ideas for him to look into, and serves as his emotional support. And yet, by the end, Nichols is wondering if even she is involved in the far-reaching conspiracy. It’s this particular bit of misdirection that keeps the viewer’s interest even as the film rolls toward the usual bloody shootout.
Any whodunit has to mislead and offer competing suggestions of who might be the killer and why they did it. “Reptile” abounds in suspects and false clues. By the climax, you’re not sure anyone can be trusted. And that’s fine. But in going out if its way to confuse the situation and make almost all the characters seem sus, it does get confusing, and as the climax approaches, I found it hard to piece plot elements together.
First-time director Grant Singer, whose work to this point has all been directing music videos, does a pretty good job. The movie’s more confusing than it really needs to be, and if you watch with subtitles on, they alert you to the tremendous amount of ominous music underlying mundane action in order to inject suspense. I suppose that if your main experience is with music videos, it’s natural to depend on a film’s music to telegraph things to the audience. This is certainly true of a recurring bit of music that appears in a cellphone’s ringtone.
At the beginning I mentioned that in addition to the blond murder victim, there is another actor, Sky Ferreira, who appears in a scene so brief — she’s being interviewed by Nichols — that I didn’t even catch who her character was. She’s representative of the overabundance in this film of characters, plot threads, passing jokes, suspects, and weirdos. At times I couldn’t see the forest for the trees; other times, as in her scene, there’s not enough information. So, too much information or too little. Only once is the balance perfect, in the sequence where Nichols and his partner arrive at the scene of Summer’s murder. They walk through a crowd of onlookers and cops and go up to a detective.
Nichols: Whatta we got here?
Detective: We got a dead Realtor.
With that, Nichols walks up the driveway to the murder house. He doesn’t need anything more, and for once, neither do we.