Misleadingly titled Surveillance is Jennifer Lynch’s first commercial feature since her hotly debated only other one, the 1993 Boxing Helena. Scriptwriting again, this time together with Kent Harper on his originally supernatural first draft, she asserts, “I definitely make films for myself.”

Once more she goes after the provocative and violent, horror and beauty, mood shifts, black humor, “aberrant sex,” non sequiturs, and a mix of bright surreal with flat mid-America (though location-filmed in Saskatchewan). Somewhat like father like daughter, though without executive producer David’s occasionally disturbing nightmare-comedy. Indeed, “my dad challenged me completely, called up late one night to tell me I couldn’t do that at the end of my script!!”

And daddy was right, for that ten minutes’ surprise ending is the straw that breaks the back of the preceding eight-seven whose implausibilities of plot and chronology can be overlooked in the intricacies within intricacies. Lynch Senior correctly pegged as “evil” what the daughter sees as “darkness,” and the film’s late, unprepared-for perversity turnabout undoes what has gone before, rendering it all overkill out of the unkind drug-and-beer giggles of two of the characters.

A gratuitous murder is committed, the first of many, a man bloodied in bed by someone unnecessarily wearing a disfigured head mask, the hysterical wife fleeing only to be paralyzed in the headlights of the intruder’s white van. Subsequent other grisly deaths occur on a straight highway in barren middle-of-nowhere Vellacott County, including the shooting of police officer Jim Conrad (French Stewart), leaving his patrol partner Jack Bennett (scriptwriter Harper) bloodied, angry, distraught, obscene and uncooperative.

Parking beside the smashed patrol car outside austere police headquarters, federal agents Elizabeth Anderson and Sam Hallaway (Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman) arrive to take the cases out of the hands of hesitant but compliant local Captain Billings (Michael Ironside) and his other officers Degrasso and Wright (Gill Gayle, Charlie Newmark). Instituting their own methods, the Feds set up separate questioning situations, each to be monitored by Sam through the station house closed-circuit cameras.

In whole or partly, the three questionees relate their own versions, their words dissolving into dream-looking flashbacks which at times agree with what is said but at others run counter to it. One is Bobbi Prescott (Pell James), who gets high on cocaine and alcohol driving with Johnny (Mac Miller) before and after they take what they can from an OD’d dealer. This surviving addict has a maternal instinct for eight-year-old Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins), soothingly interviewed by Elizabeth and the survivor of the massacre of her mother, older brother and stepfather.

Officer Bennett is the third observed interviewee, apparently a bad-cop twosome with his dead partner, dangerously trigger-happy and stopping cars for trumped-up speeding to terrorize the motorists with hetero- and homosexual humiliation.

One young couple already wiped out as a collateral result of the officers’ sadistic games and a coincident road “accident,” the three witnesses’ back stories overlap, affirm and contradict themselves and one another, as agents (and audience) are left to piece together the truth that, aside from the killers, only Stephanie knows or intuits, but no one seriously believes children.

If not examined too closely, these converging yet conflicting versions might have made for a stout crime-movie jigsaw puzzle. The impossible letdown twist-for-its-own-sake trashes everything, however, and exposes how unstable this house of cards has been. Surveillance pretends to perversity of story but winds up as only perverse filmmaking. Kim Basinger lost a multi-million-dollar lawsuit for backing out of Boxing Helena but gained a lot of common-sense respect; the cast of this second film would have done well to follow her lead. 

(Released by Magnet Releasing/Magnolia Pictures and rated “R” for strong bloody violence, pervasive language, some drug use and a scene of aberrant sexuality.)