World Premiere, 78 min.
Country and Year: USA (2006)
Director: Eric Nicholas
Starring: Ana Claudia Talancon, Colin Hanks

Review by: Charlie Prince
Rating: 3 out of 4 stars

Alone with Her is one of the better movies I’ve seen at the Tribeca Film Festival this year. Conceptually it sounds very unusual, maybe gimmicky: the film is seen entirely from the perspective of various illicit surveillance cameras that our star stalker/pervert has secretly installed in a pretty girl’s room. Now if you’re like me, your first reaction to that description may be to think that it could be annoying to watch surveillance footage for an entire movie, but it turns out that this setup works wonderfully (keep in mind this is much higher resolution surveillance footage than you might see on a monitor at your local 7-Eleven), and that it greatly adds to the suspense. For that reason alone, director Eric Nicholas deserves credit. But in a film as centrally focused on one person as this is (Ana Claudia Talancon is onscreen for pretty much every frame of the film), it must be the tremendous acting that makes this film work, and Talancon (who you may have seen previously in the Mexican mega-hit The Crimes of Father Amaro) gives a fantastic performance.

Colin Hanks (Orange County, King Kong) also does a good job with an unusual role as Doug. Doug is a complicated character to play for many reasons, not least of all because for the first 30 minutes or so, we can only hear Doug, not see him. We in the audience see only what Doug sees (he’s carrying the surveillance camera), and we hear his voice in the background. Despite this, Hanks manages to immediately give Doug a depth of character (and a creepy character at that). At first we see what he is doing through his use of a camera mounted in a duffel bag that he carries with him as he walks around (and uses to, among other creepy tasks, get video footage shots that are aimed up girls’ skirts). We watch as Doug scopes out a girl to prey on, we watch him follow Amy (Talancon) home, and we watch him install hidden surveillance cameras in her apartment while she’s out. From then on out, the audience is able to see through several different cameras, and the footage alternates between them (occasionally cutting out to static, to remind us of the source of the footage).

In this process, in addition to the expected creepy voyeur shots (he has a surveillance camera aimed at the shower) Doug is collecting information about the girl. First, he confirms that she has just broken up with a serious boyfriend and is lonely. He delves into her life: what she likes to listen to, where she goes for coffee, what her financial situation is, who her friends are, what they do for fun, etc. He arranges to bump into her at a coffee shop and with this catalog of information in mind, hints at liking all the same things she does over a series of “coincidental” times of bumping into one another. Amy tells her friend on the phone that Doug is not that cute, but she’s intrigued by him anyway because they have a lot in common. Her friend encourages her to have “fun” with the guy, but Amy is hesitant, saying “there’s something ‘off’ about him” that she can’t put her finger on. We in the audience of course know that she’s right, and now that we’ve seen him, we see him that he’s a fairly normal-looking, though extremely dorky and awkward, guy.

Encouraged by what he’s hearing, Doug continues to insert himself into her life. By helping out at the right time, and increasingly by arranging to have problems beset her so that she’ll need his help, he wiggles his way into her life in a short period of time, to the point that she thinks of him as a good friend. As Amy finds herself more in need of help and more dependent on Doug, she begins to reconsider whether he might make for a romantic friend after all – a big turn-around from her initial, gut reaction. Things seem to be going perfectly according to Doug’s plan.

But Amy’s best friend grows openly skeptical – Doug seems unable to act even semi-normally around a girl he hasn’t stalked. Doug, who is quick to lose his temper and swear as footage unfavorable to his goals unveils before him on his remote-viewing screen (presumably at his home), he must engineer developments to help fend off the contagious skepticism of Amy’s friend and a rival (non-stalker) guy who takes Amy out on a few dates. As problems mount, Doug becomes increasingly desperate. And dangerous.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. One thing is clear regardless of how it ends: the equipment that is available (at non-prohibitive costs) to do what Doug does in the film exists, and it’s scary. Technology, or at least surveillance technology, is as much the monster in this film as Doug is. Director Nicholas said after the screening that he viewed it as a “cautionary tale.” He wants the film to raise awareness about these technology invasions and said point-blank after the screening last Saturday that this sort of technology should be regulated by the government. While I wouldn’t go that far personally, it certainly is scary to think that bad people out there could do what Doug does in this film on a budget of a few hundred bucks, and it’s good to raise awareness of what’s lurking out there.

From a filmmaking perspective, there is much to dwell on this film. The use of alternate sources of video (in this case a surveillance camera) likely reflects a trend. (This comes up again briefly in the forthcoming review of Street Thief, which also incorporated surveillance footage). I expect that as video feeds become more and more a part of everyday, low-cost life (like in everyone’s cell phone) we’ll continue to see various kinds of footage incorporated into films to mix up the way a story can be told and to give viewers an authentic-feeling, gritty world. Perhaps more interesting, the decision to only show us what Doug can see in his surveillance equipment (even when Doug himself is in the path of those cameras and not watching them from his home). The audience becomes the voyeur, we are seeing through the eyes of the stalker, and through his eyes only. This sometimes seems a bit far-fetched, admittedly. One pivotal scene in the woods in particular (in the final act) seems an extremely unlikely candidate for video documentation. But I guess that is to be expected in a film like this, and if anything it’s surprising that the director didn’t have to cheat more to tell the story effectively. Conversely, there are times where the limits add to the suspense of the film. There are times when Amy goes off-camera at a key moment, where she’s no longer within view of any of the cameras, and we see Doug alternating between the different angles available to him, desperately trying to find out what is happening.

Eric Nicholas, the director, told some funny stories after the screening. For example, when shooting the early shots of Doug going around with a camera in a duffle bag, getting illicit shots up the skirts of girls (who were paid actresses and knew what he was doing), he said one time he and one actress were out filming the shot on a street, unbeknownst to the people around them, until one guy walking by figured out what they were doing and angrily confronted director Nicholas about it. Nicholas thought he was going to be attacked until the actress backed up his story. “I have to see that movie” the almost-attacker is reported to have said once he understood what was actually going on. Nicholas also said that he met with hundreds of girls for the role of Amy, and it wasn’t until Talancon showed up that he knew he had his lead, and changed the script to reflect a Latina girl, as opposed to the originally envisioned blond haired, blue eyed “girl next door.”

Hanks, who along with Talancon was also there for questions after the screening, described his role a bit and explained that it was a difficult character to internalize, that he allowed himself to gain weight and to (essentially) come to an unpleasant state of self-loathing to be able to act the part. Unlike other projects he worked on, it wasn’t a “fun” filming experience (because of the nature of the role, not because of any other problems on set — they seem to have all gotten along great). It was one of the harder acting challenges he’s faced yet in his career, he said.

This film is definitely in the top 10% of the films I’ve seen at the fest so far, and if you have an opportunity to see it, I’d highly recommend taking up that chance.

Related Links:
::: Official Site
::: Tribeca Film Festival Site

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© Charlie Prince