The unnerving “Red Road” is a thriller that seems almost custom-made for the digital age, a mystery that manipulates proximity the same way most movies of this ilk rely on butcher knives, mysterious late-night phone calls and bombastic soundtracks.

The story opens to a wall of security camera monitors, a room illuminated with real-time surveillance images that are being waded through by Jackie (Kate Dickie), who clicks from camera to camera and turns from monitor to monitor, looking for anything suspicious in this unending virtual landscape.

As she presides over the images, she finds storylines to follow – watching compassionately as a man walks his ailing old dog down the sidewalk on a daily basis, then later growing concerned as a man chases a woman through a dimly-lit back alley, before realizing they are only finding a hidden place to make love against a graffiti-strewn brick wall. “False alarm,” she tells her dispatcher over the phone; for once, there’s not a crime being committed in this shady area of Glasgow, just two people having sex.

And then, in a moment that evokes the voyeuristic horror of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” Jackie’s jaw drops as she grabs her joystick and zooms in on an image of that man pulling up his trousers. Looking back at her from across the digital divide is a face she recognizes - a face she becomes obsessed with and consumed by.

Directed by Andrea Arnold, who works with some loose allegiance to the hyper-realistic dictates of Lars Von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement and who herself has received accolades and awards for this, her first full-length feature (her Oscar-winning 2003 short film “Wasp” was an achievement of low-budget tension made simple), “Red Road” seems at first to be a movie about the nature of watching and being watched.

But thankfully, Arnold is not interested in reiterating such clichéd sentiments about an omniscient police state. Instead, her agenda is something far more timely and titillating: A thriller based firmly in the digital age, a character study simultaneously reliant upon, yet hindered by, technology. Much as the Internet provides a forum where we can learn everything without ever knowing anyone, where we can interact with screen names without ever learning the names behind them, Jackie comes to watch this man (Tony Curran), learning his daily routine and memorizing his every action (in one notable scene, she runs into another room so she can access the city’s traffic cameras and monitor his driving in real-time), but remains initially trapped on the other side of the camera.

And Arnold casts the audience’s relationship with Jackie using much the same dynamic. Just as we strive to learn more about our would-be heroine, watching her – through Arnold’s exaggerated close-ups and jagged camera angles – for any hint of disclosure in the weary, tired, worn face of Dickie, we remain frustratingly at a distance, unsure of what pain has beaten her down or how this man is linked to that source of agony.

From the outset, “Red Road” is a study of how someone can be so close yet so distant, a story obsessed with the way Jackie can leave her surveillance booth, come within feet of this man she is stalking, but fail to cross over those final few inches. And it’s a jarring sensation, for a thriller not to be about the chase, or the mysterious force of evil lurking in the shadows, but about an intangible gulf dividing two people occupying the same room and – in one extraordinarily ambiguous and disturbing scene – the same bed.

by: Steven Snyder steven@zertinet.com, Published 2007-06-21