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I've never seen a movie that was so low-keyed and easygoing yet so disturbing. The first film directed by screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who co-wrote Blade Runner -- more weekly coincidence -- stars laconic Owen Wilson (from Armageddon and The Haunting, and the upcoming Jackie Chan chopsocky Western Shanghai Noon) as Vann Siegert, the most polite, nonviolent, itinerant serial killer you could ever hope not to meet.
Driving around the Pacific Northwest in a very clean pickup truck, Vann gets random urges to poison people, a proclivity he ponders at length in Zen-ish narration. When he temporarily settles down and rents a room from an equally polite, inscrutable couple (Mercedes Ruehl, and Brian Cox, who Manhunter was the first to assay the character of Hannibal Lecter), takes a seasonal job at the post office, socializes, makes friends, falls in love with a co-worker (Janeane Garofalo), and does all kinds of other normal stuff, the stage seems set for some kind of quiet apocalypse. The effect is like taking a drive up to the Savannah River nuclear plant: it's pretty and serene, but you still get the nagging fear that one day it might go off, taking the community with it.
This is one of those things for which I can give you the basic outline and cast (also present are Dennis Haysbert and Dwight Yoakam as imaginary FBI agents who interrogate Vann during hallucinations that may have something to do with his behavior, and Wilson's girlfriend Sheryl Crow -- who can't act very well, but if it makes him happy...), but you just have to see it to understand. I'd call it strangely beautiful, except one of my friends might take that as an unqualified endorsement, rent the video, then never want to be alone with me again. B
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