All style, no substance

From Nicholas Pesce, the writer and director of The Eyes of My Mother (2016), Piercing is a darkly comic psychosexual thriller. Partly a screwball comedy about a fastidious man's attempt to murder a prostitute, and his confusion and helplessness when he realises that that prostitute is far more disturbed than he is, the film dares the audience to attempt to figure out who is in charge at any given moment, and to ponder whether one (or both) of these characters would actually be quite happy to be the other's victim. Purposely made to look like a sleazy seventies skin flick, the film's sense of nostalgia drips off the screen, manifest in everything from the music borrowed from giallo films to the art-deco production design to the patently fake urban skyline to the lurid opening credits (complete with retro "Feature Presentation" card). In this sense, Pesce is a stylist, in the best sense of the term. However, at the moment, he is a stylist without much to say; as in The Eyes of My Mother, he is unable to match his not-inconsiderable aesthetic acumen with any kind of significant or tangible emotionality. The two leads are not necessarily the type of characters we're naturally predisposed to feel empathetic towards, but we surely must be expected to feel something. Anything. However, with no real sense of psychological verisimilitude nor much in the way of interiority, they remain essentially blank canvases, and primarily for this reason, the film feels more like a sketch than a finished product.

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