Film Reviews

The Shape of Things

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Gretchen Mol
• Details: US / 97 mins / (18).

Based on the director's own stage play, 'The Shape of Things' sees Neil LaBute at his most vitriolic but this stodgy, staid translation sees the director at his clumsiest. Mistaking narcissism for intellectualism, 'The Shape of Things' follows the bludgeoning romance between Adam (Paul Rudd) and Evelyn (Rachel Weisz). At the start of the movie, he's a befuddled part-time museum security guard and student who encounters her aspiring artist at work. She's about to deface a prominent sculpture and buoyed by her bravado and his own hormones, he gets her phone number at the expense of the statute. A relationship develops between the two and over the course of the next few months; they build up to the point where Evelyn actually moulds Adam into a totally new person.
A mean-spirited film with a deeply puritanical viewpoint, 'The Shape of Things' should be edgy but winds up feeling deeply cynical. Vicious without being thought-provoking or humorous, the film doesn't pertain to offer anything other than moral outrage at its facile and rather trite, if shocking denouement. The film's sense of injustice is palpable throughout but quite aside from the fairly harsh central tenant of the film, the stage setting of the film is replicated to an uncomfortable degree which seems utterly overplayed in the medium of film. A glance could have been used instead of a weighty sheaf of dialogue.

Review by Garreth Murphy