Dead Man's Curve


Photo Courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival

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Review, by Richard Schwartz

Fact or urban myth? If your roommate in college commits suicide, you get an automatic 4.0 for the semester. But what if it just looks like a suicide? Either way, it's a great premise for a suspense thriller. With admission to the Graduate School of Business at Harvard as the stakes, best friends Tim and Chris devise a plan to murder their roommate Rand and make it look like suicide. Everything seems to be going according to plan, at least at first.

But as the police start questioning the facts and friends start questioning friends, their foolproof plan begins to unravel. The question remains: Just who is being set up?

Filled with up-to-the-minute popular-culture references, the keeps-you- guessing-until-the-very-end story line is a pleasure. Spoofing everything from silly college rituals to old suspense thrillers, Dead Man's Curve turns the genre on its head. The tongue-in-cheek humor is delicately combined with a dark and twisted undercurrent that festers below the surface. Issues of privilege and class in East Coast colleges and testing the limits of true friendship are fodder for the plot.

Written and directed by Dan Rosen (who wrote The Last Supper), Dead Man's Curve is a cheeky, tightly constructed film. Infused with sharply written, frequently sarcastic dialogue, the story flies along at a nonstop pace. Extremely well acted by the young and very handsome cast, this film is too much fun to miss.

- Lisa Viola

Directed by: Dan Rosen
Written by: Dan Rosen
Starring: Matthew Lillard, Michael Vartan, Randall Batinkoff, Keri Russell, Tamara Craig Thomas, Anthony Griffith
Produced by: Jeremy Law, Ted Schipper
Original Music by: Shark