Dir. Nick Tomnay
Score: 5.4

David Hyde Pierce might be a fine actor of considerable mettle and achievement, but his comfortable range -- running the gamut between blue-blood aristocrat and metropolitan art dealer -- is considerably more limited than he would have us believe.

Writer/Director Nick Tomnay's psychological farce/thriller is twistier than a cone of soft serve, but it ultimately spirals one too many times for its own good. The story concerns a fugitive, John Taylor (Clayne Crawford), on the lam after a bank robbery has left him bleeding and hobbled. With nowhere else to go, he attempts to con his way into a house in a well to-do section of L.A., finally arriving at the immaculate doorstep of Warwick (Pierce), a precise elder gentleman expecting guests over a dinner party. What begins as a kind of farce of manners, with the eminently polite Warwick unwittingly entertaining a guest who has designs on robbing him blind, quickly goes into much darker -- and, it must be said, far less believable -- territory. Not only is Warwick not what he first appears, he's not the second or third thing, either, and, it turns out, neither is John.

The film takes delight in setting us up and confounding us. It's a powerful trick, especially with such fine actors playing off of our expectations and turning them on their head, but it eventually gets overplayed by half, forcing us to accept ever more farfetched ideas, until it finally runs out of cards to play. There is plenty to find engaging about the film, especially in its convoluted first third, with our sympathies flying back and forth between the two men as they attempt to outbid one another, but ultimately, it has no place to go other than the absurdly coincidental.