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With LOOK, accomplished screenwriter and director Adam Rifkin (THE DARK BACKWARD, DETROIT ROCK CITY) takes the modern world's infatuation with surveillance technology to a disarming new level. After opening the film with a jarring title card that explains just how many surveillance cameras exist in our society, Rifkin then goes on to prove it by using surveillance camera footage exclusively to tell his multifaceted story (artificially constructed, of course, but convincing nonetheless). What follows is an acerbic commentary on America in which a wide spectrum of citizens are captured in a series of unsettling, uncomfortable, sometimes hilarious, and ultimately dramatic situations. They include two cop killers on the lam, two bored convenience store clerks, a philandering husband, a sex-addicted clothing store manager, a high school teacher and the student who is out to seduce him, a nerdy office worker who is constantly harassed by his coworkers, a devastated mother whose daughter is abducted, and the mysterious abductor himself. Rifkin ingeniously uses his conceit as a way to comment on how depraved our society has become, yet he also uses humor to keep things from becoming too bleak and dour. As hidden camera after hidden camera captures the glaring foibles of these intersecting lives, we become further embroiled in the dramas at hand. The result is an unsettling portrait of a world at its nastiest, where good intentions become bad ones, and in which happy endings occur, albeit with crushingly ironic twists.
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