Perfect Stranger English Movie
After a long time, a good old-fashioned thriller - though cast in the modern day world of online chats, firewalls and hacking. It's not the greatest piece of cinema you've seen, but it's an engrossing watch and keeps you guessing till the end.
No body in the library here and no nosy detective peering for clues through a magnifying glass. Instead, we have the magnificent Halle Berry as Rowena, the feisty journalist who has just done an exposé on a slimy senator and now goes undercover to track the man who killed her childhood friend. Her quest takes her to a glitzy ad agency run by the oh-so-suave and in control Harrison Hill (the still fun-to-watch Bruce Willis).
Aiding her in the job is colleague and drinking buddy Miles (Ribisi), the fiendishly clever geek who not only lends her a shoulder to cry on but also instructs her on how to inveigle Hill into seductive late night chats.
There's blackmail, infidelity, sexual peccadilloes and lots of dark edges in what is essentially a whodunit, but one that is multi-layered. No one is quite what they seem in the overlapping worlds of the real and the virtual, where the characters are sometimes distorted, sometimes real as in a flawed mirror.
So, who did kill Grace, Rowena's friend who tells her one night at the station about how she was taken for a ride by a rich ad guy she met online? Grace is found brutally killed one night. And the needle of suspicion points to...you guessed it Harrison Hill, the man with the rich wife who has a penchant for chatting up girls online and who is supremely successful.
Plenty of red herrings in this tale of constantly changing identities and wondering who really is the perfect stranger - the man you know so well or maybe the woman you don't know at all.
The good old twist in the tale at the end is what thrillers are all about. Halle Berry looks good and is good as the sometimes flawed investigative journalist hiding dark secrets from her childhood. Bruce Willis is a delight to watch. He's visibly older and the wrinkles are much more pronounced, but he's just right from the part. The scene stealer, however, is Giovanni Ribisi as Miles who exercises such control over the narrative of the film.
Good for an evening out in the theatre. Fun to keep guessing through the entire duration. Don't expect anything too great and you won't feel cheated. But do go watch.
