Product Details

• Actors: Willem Dafoe, Scott Speedman, Peter Stormare, Clea DuVall, James Rebhorn
• Directors: Henry Miller
• Format: Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Ifc
• DVD Release Date: December 9, 2008
• Run Time: 107 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B001F0TM1C
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #61,817 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Academy Award®-nominee Willem Dafoe* (Spiderman, Platoon) is a detective drawn into a gruesome case in this intense psychological thriller. Haunted by the killings, he soon finds himself confronting his own deadly past. With each slaying, the investigation takes a different, darker turn. And the nearer he's drawn to the murders, the closer he could become the ultimate victim - or take the fall for the crimes. Also starring Scott Speedman (The Strangers) and Clea Duvall ("Heroes").

Stills from Anamorph (Click for larger image)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Artful Enough, January 16, 2009

By	R. Schultz (Chicago) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There's another fantastic serial killer at work here, posing his victims in fabulously mutilated displays. This movie follows in the footsteps of TV's CSI series in that it shows how an increasingly jaded audience pressures media-makers to come up with ever more grisly, bizarre crimes and images to hold people's interest. Being a movie rather than a TV episode though, "Anamorph" has the luxury of taking more time to anticipate and dwell on the gore.

Actually, the movie takes altogether too much time. It consists of long pauses - taciturn, stony exchanges - and empty, unexplained affect between scenes. There's an insufficiency of script here. It's all too wildly implausible - and motives and moods hang in the air, as incompletely explained or connected as the killings themselves. And unlike in CSI episodes, almost no scientific detecting takes place here. Willem DaFoe's detective character and his partners don't even seem to follow through and find out who rented an apartment where one victim is hung in a particularly elaborate way. So a viewer can't justify the time spent viewing this film with any forensic insights gained.

However, if you are interested in art history, you might find some value in this film. It jogs to the fore certain controversies ongoing in the art world. For example, the killer uses the principle of the "camera obscura" when he walls a victim up in a hidden room and projects a striking, enlarged image of the suspended victim through a pinpoint hole in the wall. David Hockney, a noted artist himself, wrote a controversial book recently entitled "Secret Knowledge" in which he claims that many Old Masters might have achieved their realistic effects by simply projecting scenes onto their easels with a camera obscura - and then tracing those images. Some scientists have refuted Hockney, saying a camera obscura could not possibly focus images sharply enough to allow a painter to simply trace rather than draw the details of the resulting projections. You can look at the results the killer in this film achieves and consider the question for yourself.

Then there is the movie's title. An anamorphosis is a picture that appears distorted when viewed from one angle, but that can be resolved into one or more discernible images when viewed from different angles. A detail of Hans Holbein's painting "The Ambassadors" is shown to illustrate the principle. A strange smear at the bottom of Holbein's otherwise benign-looking representation can be slanted and foreshortened to reveal - a chilling image of a human skull.

So "Anamorph" does provide some slight exposure to mysteries inherent in a few famous paintings and can serve as a lead-in to some on-going debates over technique in the art world. As a whole though, this movie remains an unresolved, inexplicable distortion of reality from whatever angle you view it.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars HENRY MILLER, OPUS 2, September 11, 2008

By	wdanthemanw "wdanthemanw" (Geneva, Switzerland) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

***1/2 2007. Written and directed by Henry Miller. Five years after having killed Uncle Eddie, a serial killer, Det. Stan Aymard is asked to find another serial killer who likes to draw paintings with the blood of his victims. A treat for Willem Dafoe fans, ANAMORPH tells the improbable story of a killer piling on artistic considerations. The story and the mood of the movie are not very original but the study of Willem Dafoe's character could lead you to discover this film. Recommended.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Serial Murder Thriller, December 21, 2008

By	The Movie Man "tenebre89" (Maywood, New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews

"Anamorph" focuses on veteran NYPD detective Stan (Willem Dafoe), who's drawn into a gruesome case involving a string of ghastly serial murders perpetrated by a killer who commits his crimes as an artist. As he investigates the killings, Stan finds he must confront his own deadly past. With each murder, the investigation takes a different, uglier turn. The closer he's drawn to the murders, the closer Stan comes to being a victim himself. The R-rated film has the look and feel of such movies as "Seven" and "Saw," with disturbing images and a sustained mood of pessimistic gloom.
Dafoe is hardly the perfect casting for a guy who may become a victim. He simply looks too rugged, too intimidating. But the script isn't bad, director H.S. Miller creates suspense, and the New York City setting has a sinister look reminiscent of "Taxi Driver." The title refers to anamorphosis, a painting technique that manipulates the laws of perspective to create two competing images on a single canvas -- a conventional image and a deformed version that appears when the work is viewed in some unconventional way. The DVD contains no extras.