Director: Dain Said
MPAA Rating: NR
Runtime: 102 mins
Existing on a precipice between its police-procedural grittiness and the fantastical digressions of its local mythology, Interchange is an anomaly with a failure to delineate these worlds from one another or to give exposition to their coexistence, making its investigative trip to mystic territory obtuse at best.
The grounded nature of Dain Said’s metropolitan murder mystery lays a foundation for the more mystical elements, all pulled respectably from Borneo’s tribal culture, to overtake it and colorize our impressions of the world set up within the first half. A standard formula – if there ever was one – when interjecting a fantasy element into a traditionally realistic film. Said and his script, however, never bother to set the barrier between what is considered normal and fantastical in The proposed world of the film, making the late introduction of the latter highly unceremonious and confusing.
I consider it a distressing issue when I see a character with inexplicable talons instead of hands or a character referring to oneself as a shaman, and I am unsure whether 1) this is a world where magic is just an element of it and the characters are acting normally to this or 2) that this is a sequel or adaptation where the original had a lot more obligatory exposition.
There is an implied history among the characters investigating a string of bizarre, ritualistic murders, which, due to the sparsity of details in the script, would assume some prequel to explain their familiarity. Detective Man is working a case where the victims are found strung up by veins, covered in molted feathers and have had their blood drained out through roots in these implausible, yet aesthetically interesting, tableaus.
Found at each crime scene is a cracked-glass negative of a photo, so Man takes this shard to a former forensic photographer, Adam (their implied history is never given enough screen time to assume their relationship), and the hunt for the mysterious entity is underway despite the severity of the crime never coming across to the audience.
Again, these ritualistic murders aren’t treated as a strange occurrence or given an iota of gravitas in Said’s proposed world, so being thrown into an apparent ongoing case with characters overly familiar with one another – who refuse to react to the circumstances – makes the whole exercise a chore to piece together from our position.
I was dying for some backstory in this film, especially when Adam gets pulled into the mystical killer’s plot and finds himself hobnobbing with immortal shamans like it’s an everyday occurrence.
Credit where credit is due although Said does a terrible job in outlining the specifics of his world, he does well to photograph it and absorb you into his half-baked concept. The grit and neon of the streets’ locations in the procedural side clash poetically with the naturalistic otherworldly mystical side in an impressive balancing act of styles complementing one another.
Though he is unprepared to write these worlds parallel to one another, his concept of the two co-existing comes through visually rather than narratively. With the film being a police procedural and the intricacies and motivations of the plot being of paramount importance to the enjoyment of the film, this is an issue, but nonetheless the world itself has definition in how it looks rather than how it functions. It’s loosely defined investigation makes Interchange an interesting mythology that is crucially missing its direction through it all.
The mythological side of the spectrum is equally ill defined, as if there was an assumption on the part of Said (a Malaysian-Indonesian filmmaker) that the mythological underpinnings of Malaysian culture were universally understood. There was an opportunity here to pursue this cultural curiosity with depth that fails to be a part of Interchange.
The blasé acceptance of the mystical aspects of the story coupled with how characters describe them in the simplest possible definitions once again makes Interchange‘s status as being caught between two worlds of rational and supernatural seem dubious at best.
Its villain, the aforementioned talon character, doesn’t talk about myth as much as he recites vaguely spiritual platitudes (“I am in control of destiny” or “the ritual must be completed”) that offer little to no insight. This was another film where I assumed cultural ignorance on my part to compensate for the film’s inability to inform me on any mystical tangent it went on.
Besides this, Interchange just isn’t a very good mystery or procedural drama. Pick out the gimmick of its supernatural additions, and you’re left with a plodding, unfocused investigation that is in desperate need for structure. Much of the police work is relegated to off-screen space, the murderers whom they hunt never seem like a legitimate threat due to their unclear motivations, and characters are so propped up by conventions of the genre that their impact on the narrative can be guessed within the span of their introduction.
Interchange was in need of its fantasy elements to elevate this to something that its weak police-procedural foundation could never reach on its own. So when those elements are themselves confusingly defined, I am at a loss for where the appeal for this particular film could come from.
There remains hope for this concept of a world that balances noir and fantasy elements like a Blade Runner could so effortlessly keep both hard science fiction and noir in the air at the same time, but Interchange is not that film.
What could have absolved much of its clunky execution was a clear commitment to exposition for is disparate genres as they relate to one another. Without the backstory, Interchange frustrates while it entices you with a world it cannot be bothered to define.
