Stoker.

“Just as a flower cannot choose its color, we are not responsible for what we’ve come to be. This is what it means to be free.” Stoker, the first English-speaking film by Korean horror-flick director Chan-wook Park (Oldboy), practically hemorrhages that kind of pretentious, dumbfoundingly meaningless writing. But it does have a dark, satisfyingly sinister feeling of gothic creepiness that I somewhat reluctantly admit appealed to my enjoyment of perversity as entertainment, including the rather obvious title nod to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That is not a recommendation. Clearer heads will find it absurdly pointless.

Chan-wook Park, sometimes listed as Park Chan-wook (don’t ask) has a nice feel for spacey thrillers, but he speaks only a few words of English, and it shows. The script, by Wentworth Miller, an actor with scant writing experience, seems to be constructed phonetically. It is simply awful, so you just have to stop worrying if it will eventually come together into a cohesive entity and enjoy the ride. It’s about the demented Stoker family, a bunch of sick sisters who inhabit a morose old mansion somewhere in the wilds of an uncharted Connecticut nobody has ever found. It begins on the 18th birthday of India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska from The Kids Are All Right), when her architect father Richard (Dermot Mulroney, who is seen only briefly in a couple of flashbacks) is killed mysteriously. Grief-stricken India and her loopy, oversexed mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) are suddenly invaded by Dad’s long-lost younger brother Charlie (Matthew Goode), who takes up residence and becomes part of the family. Uncle Charlie is a handsome, friendly and charming guy who kindles in India a passion for firearms and awakens her mother’s sleeping hormones—and he can cook, too. Then India notices that when Uncle Charlie takes his belt off, it doesn’t always lead to sex. Sometimes there’s homicide by strangulation. First she finds the Stoker housekeeper in the freezer with the ice cream, then a curious aunt who disappears after Richard’s funeral. Finally, after he interrupts a boy on the verge of ending India’s virginity on a country road, she watches in fascination as Uncle Charlie ties him up, twists the belt around his esophagus and breaks his neck. This all happens early, so don’t worry about spoilers. There’s much more to come.

“Sometimes you need to do something bad to keep from doing something worse,” uncle and niece agree. There was a baby brother who disappeared. What happened to him? India finds a stack of unopened letters from Uncle Charlie that her father kept hidden. Why do they all bear the return address of an insane asylum? As Margaret Hamilton cackled in The Wizard of Oz, “all in good time, my dears, all in good time.” Meanwhile, Ms. Wasikowska fares well in her first grown-up leading role. The hugely underrated Mr. Goode, who lived up to his name as Colin Firth’s lover in A Single Man, is smoothly suave, dashing and sexy as he covers up the traces of a psychopath. You will be reluctant to take your eyes off him as he changes moods and expressions right before you like a chameleon. Jacki Weaver, Oscar-nominated as the mother in Silver Linings Playbook, provides moments of real tension as the distraught aunt whose warnings go ignored until it’s too late. Even the criminally wasted Ms. Kidman and Mr. Mulroney bring some badly needed shivers to their enigmatic assignments. The ghost of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, with Teresa Wright as the wary niece and Joseph Cotten as the dubious uncle, hovers in every frame. Of course, Hitchcock was a much better filmmaker, who tied all of loose strings together in tidier knots. Stoker doesn’t add up to anything memorable, but Park Chan-wook (or Chan-wook Park) has a few arresting touches of his own, and the film is elegantly, masterfully photographed by cinematographer Chunghoon Chung.

I’m so dizzy just spelling the names that I hope this polyglot doesn’t become a habit.

STOKER

Running Time 98 minutes

Written by Wentworth Miller and Erin Cressida Wilson

Directed by Chan-wook Park

Starring Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode

rreed@observer.com

McConaughey and Efron in The Paperboy.

One by one, the punishments suffered last month at the Toronto film circus are arriving to pollute the screens at home. Next week, get ready for a diabolical torture called Seven Psychopaths. For now, avoid at all costs a trash-wallow about sex and inbred Southern racism called The Paperboy. The director is Lee Daniels, who shocked and turned off a sizeable portion of the public three years ago with Precious. Maybe shock for the sake of nothing else is what he stands for, but regardless of what you thought about his disturbing feature debut, it was light years ahead of The Paperboy. This raunchy dreck, cut from the same disposable toilet tissue as the recent trailer-trash creepfest Killer Joe, is a leap downhill from Precious.

A transcendentally awful slab of chicken-fried camp replete with Nicole Kidman urinating on the near-naked body of Zac Efron, The Paperboy was booed in Cannes, laughed down in Toronto and inserted in the New York Film Festival for no other purpose than to stir up controversy. It has no place in any of them. A cartoonish and rubicund film noir that is drenched in too many bright colors to be noirish and played for lunacy by too many overwrought actors with hilariously phony Southern accents to be remotely believable, it stars Matthew McConaughey, who can’t act, and teenybopper twit Efron, who has been trying to do entirely too much of it lately. Fast on the heels of his nude romp in Killer Joe, McConaughey takes it off again, his legs tied and his rear end slightly less than camera-ready as he is viciously gang-raped by a band of black drug dealers in a seedy motel. Exposing his butt may be a disgrace, but it didn’t bother me half as much as his speech impediment. Incompetence in the acting department is one thing, but this guy whistles through his teeth. Every “s” sounds like Jack Benny’s fiddle. Even in a good movie, too much Matthew McConaughey makes it hard to concentrate.

And The Paperboy is not just a bad movie. It’s a stinker. McConaughey is dismally miscast as a gay closet-case Miami reporter named Ward Jansen, who returns to his hometown in the Everglades to investigate the murder of a bigoted sheriff by a maniac named Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack). Ward is accompanied by a fashion-sleek black reporter with an English accent named Yardley (David Oyelowo), whose looks and attitude draw instant hatred from the local rednecks. The chauffeur for this motley pair is Ward’s younger brother Jack (Zac Efron), a college dropout turned newspaper delivery boy who falls for the death-row killer’s girlfriend Charlotte, the town tramp with a penchant for convicted felons, played by a Nicole Kidman with undulating thighs, pounds of lipstick and her old bottle-blonde wig from To Die For. While this rancid, raucous freak show crawls on its knees in the direction of disaster, the actors are all subjected to embarrassing humiliations, but none so appalling as the sight of the accomplished but misguided Ms. Kidman saving Mr. Efron from a jellyfish sting by squatting on his swollen head, adjusting the crotch of her bathing suit, and peeing on his face. One of the loopiest lines of the year: “If anyone is going to piss on that boy, it’s going to be me!” The audience doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream, so it does both. In another regrettable scene, this death-row groupie does jailhouse sex in a prison visiting room to Mr. Cusack’s delighted arousal. This is the stuff you fire your agent for. Mr. Efron, working as fast as he can to destroy his all-American image, goes sweaty, shirtless and lewd. Mr. McConaughey’s earnest gusto for oral sex with black thugs that leads to his brutal bondage is too deplorable to describe.

Supposedly based on a true Florida crime story that took place in the ’60s and a book about the case by pulp writer Pete Dexter, the screenplay for The Paperboy (co-written by Mr. Dexter and Mr. Daniels) is too ludicrous to invite any comparisons to prize-winning journalism. Pretentious camera angles substitute for tight plotting, pirogues angling their way to crime scenes in the alligator-infested swamps where no reptiles ever appear make up for a false sense of Southern authenticity, and the crass editing robs every scene of the chance to develop character. Not the least of the punitive damages inflicted by such a painful flop is that you start squirming early and end up feeling you desperately need a bath. It’s all narrated by a black maid Mr. Efron sexually mauls from time to time who seems like a demented throwaway from a sendup of The Help. Although it is never clear to whom she is speaking, or why, I had to applaud when she finally utters the funniest line in the movie: “I think y’all seen enough.” Amen, and bring on the Lysol.

rreed@observer.com

THE PAPERBOY

Running Time 107 minutes

Written by Lee Daniels and Peter Dexter

Directed by Lee Daniels

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman and John Cusack

0/4

With relatively brief screen time in The Paperboy, Ms. Kidman takes over the film; a lurid mélange starring Zac Efron as a young man who stumbles upon conspiracy and evil, the film tips all too often, as did Mr. Daniels’s last effort, Precious, into excess. But the Australian actress, playing a past-her-prime beauty with a deadly attraction to things that are just plain wrong, clarifies the film’s Baroque obsession with violence.

In her polymorphous perversity, Ms. Kidman’s character humanizes the film’s nastiness. She puts a face on its obsession with the depraved, and through a conscious dulling of her intellect and her stock-in-trade melancholia, makes that depravity seem almost sweet. A scene in which she takes a near-naked Mr. Efron, 21 years her junior, into her arms and waltzes with him is the communion of two broken souls; when she urinates on him to relieve a jellyfish sting, it’s is an act of pure, frenzied love. “She gets her—she understands this woman,” Mr. Daniels told The Observer. “And she understands my insanity.”

That is precisely what, at least since her reinvention as a serious actress 11 years ago, Nicole Kidman does for every serious movie in which she chooses to act. She personifies the human consequences of directors’ intellectual arguments. And of all the actresses working today, she has the riskiest attitude when it comes to her collaborators. Among her contemporaries and past co-stars, Meryl Streep has winnowed her stable down to a few subpar directors who let her to do her thing. Meanwhile, few directors seem to have any idea what to do with Julianne Moore, who’s largely moved to TV. By contrast, Ms. Kidman has worked with Mr. Daniels, John Cameron Mitchell, Noah Baumbach, Jonathan Glazer and Lars von Trier, among other iconoclasts, and in each case she hasn’t merely been a part of an exacting vision, but pushed it to new places.

Part of her uniqueness, as has been widely observed, is her appetite for a kind of chic suffering. Before 2003’s Cold Mountain came out, New York Times critic A.O. Scott, in an essay on Ms. Kidman, noted of her characters, “Their misery is a sign of her independence, her courage, her victory over unpleasant circumstances, and our applause is the measure of our compassion.” This view of the actress’s career took into account her then-recent divorce from Tom Cruise and all the subsequent tabloid attention. In the years since, Ms. Kidman’s celebrity has dimmed—her name is no longer, as Mr. Scott’s put it, “inscribed at the very top of the Hollywood A-List.” With her name coming up only in the context of a paycheck movie, like 2007’s The Golden Compass, or a magazine spread on alleged plastic surgery victims (remember last year, when she claimed her beauty was natural, then admitted having used Botox by saying she’d stopped?), her audience’s compassion has waned commensurately. “Everyone was against hiring her. How could you hire her? She’s an ice princess,” said Mr. Daniels. “But those are the roles Hollywood offers you. They put you in a box. And she refuses.”

Through it all, though, she’s kept on trucking, with the loud flops of 2007 (The Invasion was the other one) reminding her that the Hollywood route is not exactly for her. There’s something deeply unsympathetic about Nicole Kidman both on- and offscreen. She’s uninterested, in a chilly way, in the give-and-take of Hollywood. Her Oscar acceptance speech for The Hours, delivered while wearing a deeply un-belle-of-the-ball, downright funereal black gown (granted, it was the beginning of the war in Iraq) and while taking out for a spin an increasingly, ahem, immobile visage, is a case study in elegant boredom. “Art is important,” the actress intoned. We may have really liked her, but did she really like us? During her two-year window of extreme fame, Mr. Scott argued that Ms. Kidman wanted to suffer for a broad audience. But the period since the fading from collective memory of her divorce from her famous Scientologist ex has proved that the more apt formulation might be that she wants a very limited art-house audience to suffer alongside her.

Her directors are, broadly speaking, known for contorting their performers into uncomfortable or compromising positions, and yet, in every case, Ms. Kidman has taken the initiative, pushing her movies further than, it would seem, even their directors intended. (Mr. Daniels said he was initially embarrassed before she urged him to direct her forcefully, at which point he told her she’d need to sit on a washing machine and spread her legs.) No moment in Mr. Daniels’s work, which has gained two performers Oscar nominations and one a win, has ever been so deeply felt as the scene in which his Paperboy star pushes younger women out of the way so that she might pee on Zac Efron.

So too do her performances in other movies push the bounds of what their directors might have intended: people remember Birth, her 2004 psychodrama about a woman united with a child she believes is her reincarnated husband, not for its directorial flair, but for a minutes-long shot of Ms. Kidman silently emoting as she watches an opera. The actress is feeling the consequences of the action more deeply than her director, who tosses away the plot of the movie in a dumb, poorly paced finale, and far more deeply than her audience, who greeted Birth with disdain and negligible box-office returns.

And consider The Hours, the film that earned Ms. Kidman an Oscar. Out of a triple-lead miasma in which two of the actresses, though credible, projected vague, early-2000s mumbly indie-film disdain for their surroundings, Ms. Kidman, playing Virginia Woolf, wrenched the film into melodrama through her sheer dogged commitment to the emotional, despite director Stephen Daldry’s clinical detachment. Or Rabbit Hole, in which director John Cameron Mitchell’s clear hope for another indie triumph—complete with animated interstitial segments—was waylaid by Ms. Kidman’s dogged earnestness in the face of losing a child. Or Dogville, in which Ms. Kidman, nearly alone among Lars von Trier’s long line of tortured leading ladies, manages not to transform into something more or less virtuous than that which she essentially is. Mr. von Trier’s other favored actresses, including Björk and Charlotte Gainsbourg, usually fall somewhere within a dull, nihilistic Scandinavian good-bad dialectic, whereas Ms. Kidman presents the sort of reactions a real person might have to being held captive and enslaved in an isolated Western town. Mr. von Trier’s films, generally, are meditations on broad themes, but with Ms. Kidman in place, Dogville became the story of a woman under duress. Amid a stream of postmodern ideas, she was, implacably, that most conventional of devices: a character.

Mr. Scott’s appraisal of Ms. Kidman’s career, for the Times, concluded that suffering was the essential element in bringing audiences to love and idolize her. Lincoln Center tributes aside, those fans have largely moved on after an unrewarding period between 2004 and 2008. Suffering is Ms. Kidman’s alienation effect—she manages to turn every picture she is in into a woman’s picture. Hers is a very particular talent, one not seen since the heyday of Joan Crawford, and Ms. Kidman’s icy public persona—buffed, polished and impervious to both age and negative press—is its perfect complement.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Ms. Kidman has never been a whiz with accents, and viewers of The Paperboy will have to forgive her tortured attempt at a Southern one. She’s never, in any sense, disappeared into a role (leaving aside The Hours, in which makeup and special effects rendered her unrecognizable). When she plays an American, as in, for instance, Margot at the Wedding, her Australian lilt comes to the fore, but it works as an aid to her portrayal of hauteur, rather than an impediment. It’s not range in the sense of breadth of possible roles that Ms. Kidman seeks—she can play a very narrow slice of the roles offered to 40-something actresses—but in the range as depth of emotion. And she has succeeded in conveying a shocking depth of emotion to an unfeeling audience in our post-ironic age. “I now know what those old-time directors felt like while working with Bette Davis or with Greta Garbo—one of the legends,” said Mr. Daniels. A director like Michael Curtiz would know exactly what to do with Ms. Kidman. As it stands, she’s had to make her own way—a vaguely defined mission that Lincoln Center honors even as audiences remain puzzled.

Downsizing her Manhattan real estate holdings.

Who needs two sprawling New York apartments? Not Nicole Kidman. The Hollywood star has finally sold one of her New York apartments, the airy spread at 176 Perry Street.
Ms. Kidman, apparently used to living in glass boxes/houses/under the glare of prying eyes (wide shut!), was once quite bewitched by the three-bedroom pad in Richard Meier's windowed tower.

But the spell was quickly broken by Richard Meier's other glass tower rising nearby at 165 Charles Street (or so rumors claim), which was said to partially block the view from Ms. Kidman's 12th-floor condo. Indeed, it is a plight sure to befall many elite New Yorkers in these coming years as competing towers fight for dominance of unobstructed forever views.

But a star never puts up with second best, and Ms. Kidman promptly bought a penthouse at 200 Eleventh Avenue, where she and Keith Urban can presumably gaze at the Hudson without any pesky starchitect buildings in the way. When they aren't staying at their place in Nashville. Or Australia.

At least the views look good from here.

Ms. Kidman's, who bought the West Village unit under the dystopic-sounding "Client 2318 Living Trust"  originally listed the apartment as a high-priced rental, asking $45,000 a month with Halstead Property broker Richard Orenstein. But the strategy, though promising spectacular returns, flopped liked a bad Baz Luhrman epic. The unit spent some months on the rental market before being purchased for $16 million. The sale was first reported The Real Deal.

Nonetheless, the condo gives a compelling performance in Mr. Orenstein's listing: clean modern lines, superb luxury finishes and "a dramatic 30-foot entrance gallery—the ideal backdrop for your art collection." The listing also informs us that the views are "mesmerizing" and "shimmering" and that the apartment will be "your oasis in the sky."

The buyer is listed on the deed as Perry West LLC. Perhaps it's another Hollywood star? Like Katie Holmes? After all, it wouldn't be the first time Ms. Holmes has followed in Ms. Kidman's footsteps. And her place at the Chelsea Mercantile is only a rental.

kvelsey@observer.com

Of course, the first signs of any impending apocalypse comes via celebrity news.

So consider this your final warning: take heed of these four horsemen that portend the world collapsing in upon itself like a dying star (or at least one considering Celebrity Rehab) and repent. Repent!

On the Road

Nicole Kidman pisses on Zac Ephron’s face! Eva Mendes cradles a Parisian sewer troll! A nude Kristen Stewart jerks off Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund—at the same time! Kanye West unveils the future of cinema inside an enormous white pyramid! Film festivals usually mete out their lunacy with more deliberation. This year, though, after a subdued week of world-class cinema, Cannes got weird fast.

Best to start with the worst. The Paperboy, Lee Daniels’ follow-up to maudlin-but-moving Oscar-winner Precious, is a hot mess of a picture, with whiplash plot twists and colorful characters acting brassy and trashy while racial tensions sputter and boil over in every direction. Based on the book by Pete Dexter and featuring an admirably game cast including Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, Zac Ephron, John Cusack, and Macy Gray, the film ostensibly revolves around a man accused of murdering a small-town sheriff. But it doesn’t take long for this story to sputter, spark, and go right off the rails. Let’s just say that Ms. Kidman and Mr. Cusack have psychic sex, Mr. Ephron suffers a near-fatal jellyfish attack, swamp people gut alligators before eating a tub of ice cream, and Mr. McConaughy ends up naked, bloody, hog-tied, and wearing an eye patch. It’s unfair to call this nut-bar melodrama unwatchable if only because it’s impossible to look away.

Far more successful but no less loopy was Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, a philosophical fantasia about the interplay of identity, cinema, art, and life, and revels in seemingly random episodes that feature a punk accordion band rocking out inside a cathedral, hyper-sexed computer-generated succubi, a Kylie Minogue torch song, and a suburban monkey family. International critics, thrilled to see such a high-wire act of cinéfolie, lapped it up. The film’s success is due in no small part to French actor Denis Levant, who rides around Paris in a limo and plays no less than 11 roles, including street gypsy, motion-capture stuntman, assassin, dying patriarch, and one-eyed underground dweller. It’s in this last role that Eva Mendes pops up for a brief appearance, as a lullaby-crooning fashion model whom Mr. Levant kidnaps from an outdoor cemetery shoot. “What was that scene about?” a journalist asked the director at the film’s press conference. “How would I know?” deadpanned Mr. Carax.

If only director Walter Salles had been more blithely instinctive with his over-reverent period piece On the Road, a handsomely packaged but painfully respectful adaptation of the 1957 Beat Generation classic by Jack Kerouac. Rarely does a film so full of sex (gay and straight, twosomes and threesomes) and drugs (Benzedrine, pot, booze and heroin) actually make vice seem banal. Hot young things Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund, Tom Sturridge and Sam Riley go full monty with their horndoggery, while older thespians like Viggo Mortensen (nailing a  spot-on William S. Burroughs) and Steve Buscemi pop up to add a touch of classy decrepitude. But there’s nothing truly dangerous, raw or even poetic about the shenanigans of these twentysomething drifters, ping-ponging throughout the country with as much spontaneity as a layout in an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue.

You want cinematic ambition? Just ask Kanye West. Last night, in a small private audience that included Jay-Z and Kim Kardashian, he unveiled plans to reinvent the way movies are experienced, with the seven-screen immersion of “Cruel Summer,” a 30-minute film shot in Qatar and made in association with the Doha Film Institute, the "cultural and creative advisors" to the film [Editor's note: We broke the story on Kanye's film in February.]. Really just a video installation set to a barrage of non-stop music, and housed inside a white pyramid tent that was a 30-minute walk from Cannes’ main venues, the screens—three in front, two on the sides, and one each overhead and on the floor—created the kind of visual overload more typical of a theme-park ride than an IMAX feature. And the film itself, though ostensibly about a wealthy blind women who uses a vast network of gold strings as a guide through her family’s palace, is really more a lush cascade of slow-motion Middle Eastern iconography, from Arabian horses and falconers to vast deserts and ultramodern cities. Rappers Kid Cudi and Big Sean appear, as does Mr. West himself and a blink-or-you’ll-miss-him Aziz Ansari.

“I’m not the best director in the world or anything like that,” Mr. West said afterwards. “But I had an idea that I thought would be amazing to inspire people so that one day this is the way people watch movies: Tarantino doing a movie like this, a horror movie like this, animation, 3D.” He also has plans to tour the film and keep working on it (especially since they were filming less than a month ago and rushed to make it to Cannes). “You guys are seeing the rough draft of this concept,” he said. “We’re going to show this in New York, we’re going to bring this out to Qatar, we’re going to take this installation around the world, and we’re going to re-edit and improve on it.” And Mr. West has no intention of stopping at film, now that he’s entered what he describes as his “post-Grammy” career. “I want to work on cities, I want to work on amusement parks,” he said. “I want to change what entertainment experiences are like.”

Jane Fonda, future Nancy Reagan on film. (Getty Images)

Lee Daniels, director of Precious, is currently in Cannes promoting the thriller The Paperboy, but he's already planning his next film, an adaptation of a Washington Post article on a long-serving black White House butler who lived to see the election of Barack Obama. Early reports indicate that the butler, Eugene Allen, is to be played by Forest Whitaker and his wife by Oprah Winfrey, who likely needs a distraction from her OWN cable network. Matthew McConaughey, in Mr. Daniels's Paperboy, is to play John F. Kennedy, somehow (but his accent is pure LBJ!); John Cusack is to become the latest actor to assay the part of Richard Nixon; Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda are playing the Reagans; Nicole Kidman is playing an unnamed role that we'd wager a President's salary will be Jackie Kennedy.

It's all very strange (a Brit playing the iconic Reagan? Jane Fonda playing a demure conservative?) but Lee Daniels has a knack for making peculiar casting work--his directing won Mo'Nique an Oscar and Mariah Carey newfound respect, and John Cusack as Nixon has a peculiar sweaty genius to it. He'll be the one who wins an Oscar for this, right?

Kidman and Gigandet.

How many ways can a film go wrong? Too many to list, and Trespass finds them all. This pointless, unintentionally campy home-invasion thriller, directed by Joel Schumacher, is as bad as it gets, and as one dumb red herring follows another, it just gets sillier and sillier. By the end, the audience at the screening I attended was roaring with laughter.

Before the masked killers arrive to brutalize them and destroy their high-tech mansion in the middle of the Louisiana swamps, Kyle and Sarah Miller (Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman) seem like the perfect couple. He is either a diamond merchant or a real estate tycoon (he’s hiding priceless gems and selling property on his mobile at the same time to reluctant clients). She’s an architect who designed an impractical glass house (in hurricane country?). She wears skin-tight, breast-stretching T-shirts and looks younger than their teenage daughter, Avery (Liana Liberato), although everybody is too obnoxious and self-involved to notice. Forbidden to party all night with the fast crowd at a cocaine-snorting orgy, Avery locks herself in her room and ignores the dinner tray Mom leaves on the floor. Meanwhile, Dad busies himself behind closed doors fiddling with a walk-in safe, talking secretly into a cell phone every waking moment, and heading for his Porsche to conduct mysterious “business.” Then the electronic chimes go off, the gate locks sound an alarm, and the house is invaded by men dressed like security guards, waving guns and ordering the family to gather in the living room. Uh-oh, Avery has sneaked out to party hearty somewhere on the bayou, and the nightmare begins. Demanding “everything you’ve got,” the intruders start slapping Mom around and knocking Dad’s eyeglasses onto the marble floor. From here on, the movie goes viral and incredulity reigns.

Instead of giving the hoodlums what they want to save his family and dream house, Kyle chooses argumentation over pragmatism. Why is he so uncooperative? While the movie shifts between the home invasion and the daughter’s party in the fast lane, Mr. Miller turns adversarial enough to dare the crooks to open fire with their Uzis, then arrogant enough to offer them a split in the stolen diamonds in his safe. Yes! He’s a criminal too! (Cue the giggles.) Instead of giving them the illegal gems, which are no longer in the safe and which can be traced, he stupidly negotiates with them, offering to find a fence, only minutes away from torture and death. The wife isn’t acting too rational either. Why does she keep flirting with the gang leader’s handsome younger brother (Cam Gigandet, the hunk from Burlesque)? He knows the house. Has he been there before, at Sarah’s invitation? Does her husband know? Aha! Here come the security tapes and there he is, in flashbacks, emerging almost naked from the swimming pool into her open arms. Enter the rebellious teenage sexpot, who goes hysterical, offering the tattooed girlfriend of one of the invaders a Vicodin. For hostages, nobody shows a lick of common sense. Or maybe it’s just bad acting. One thing is clear. The screaming, shrieking, weeping and cussing does not come from terror, but from a bad script and confused, unfocused direction. Instead of nervous tension, the audience reacts with nervous guffaws.

Trespass reunites the director with Mr. Cage, whom he directed in 8MM, and Ms. Kidman, who worked for him on the demented Batman Forever, two of the worst films of their careers. This one is worse. Stretching the talk from here to next week, director Schumacher avoids any real confrontation or plot development. The idiotic script, by somebody named Karl Gajdusek, makes no attempt at character exploration. Cameras soar around the room in a futile attempt to keep the action twisted and frantic, but the result is nausea, not tension. After getting banged around like a rag doll, Nicole Kidman turns black, blue and bloody, actually managing the impossible feat of looking cadaverous—and it’s not just the makeup. Meanwhile, something odd is happening to Mr. Cage’s face. His skin is yellow, his cheeks are swollen, and his head is too big for his body. The worst thing that ever happened to Hollywood is the invention of Botox.

rreed@observer.com

TRESPASS

Running Time 91 minutes

Written by Karl Gajdusek

Directed by Joel Schumacher

Starring Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman and Cam Gigandet

1/4