Pierce Brosnan is a college professor who teaches a creative writing course that requires students to actually write a plausible murder scenario. A complication is that the prof himself actually wrote a book implicating a friend in a murder, for which his friend is found guilty and sent to prison. There is a twist at the very end of this really good-cinema quality-movie that has had only passing reference here among the User reviews, so this critique seeks to explore that twist in more detail.
Spoiler A number of reviewers have mentioned the twist at the end without specifying whether they are alluding to the conventional penultimate twist-the one we never suspected-or the finale in the last 30 seconds leading up to the credits.
One reviewer found this the same device as in Chicago Joe and the Show Girl, but in fact that movie was content to keep jiggling the fourth wall. Murder101 does not do that until the last moment, where the wall is not merely jiggled but sort of turned into the conceptual equivalent of a time-loop. It seems the outer movie, the one we are watching on our screens, is but a tableaux to present a movie-in-the-making, a movie that lo and behold was based on a screenplay developed from the murder-assignment of one of the Prof's students, who plays an integral part in the piece himself.
I can't think of this as nothing so much as a cinematic analogue of Escher's mutually drawing hands. Everyone character in the movie is in fact also an actor playing... their own part, and to make that clear at the close, the dolly-shot backwards reveals not merely the set boom-mike, but some of the 'dead' victims as very well and alive.
This leads to a furious amount of re-thinking, after the movie, of everything presupposed, including plot-'holes' (eg. It had bothered me that the clever student had a cast-iron alibi-he was giving a presentation, at the time of Francesca's death, so the Prof had let off his suspicion; so why did he re-adopt his suspicion later on?), yet are these holes in the movie itself? Or are they defects in the self-referencing 'student's' self-referencing assignment-turned-movie script?
And it would explain something that bothered me: the student had written an absolutely STELLAR assignment; probably the most block-buster assignment any undergrad had ever written anywhere, ever. I was expecting with its impending cover-page reveal to see an "A+". Why only an "A"? Because a few... plot-holes?
Spoiler A number of reviewers have mentioned the twist at the end without specifying whether they are alluding to the conventional penultimate twist-the one we never suspected-or the finale in the last 30 seconds leading up to the credits.
One reviewer found this the same device as in Chicago Joe and the Show Girl, but in fact that movie was content to keep jiggling the fourth wall. Murder101 does not do that until the last moment, where the wall is not merely jiggled but sort of turned into the conceptual equivalent of a time-loop. It seems the outer movie, the one we are watching on our screens, is but a tableaux to present a movie-in-the-making, a movie that lo and behold was based on a screenplay developed from the murder-assignment of one of the Prof's students, who plays an integral part in the piece himself.
I can't think of this as nothing so much as a cinematic analogue of Escher's mutually drawing hands. Everyone character in the movie is in fact also an actor playing... their own part, and to make that clear at the close, the dolly-shot backwards reveals not merely the set boom-mike, but some of the 'dead' victims as very well and alive.
This leads to a furious amount of re-thinking, after the movie, of everything presupposed, including plot-'holes' (eg. It had bothered me that the clever student had a cast-iron alibi-he was giving a presentation, at the time of Francesca's death, so the Prof had let off his suspicion; so why did he re-adopt his suspicion later on?), yet are these holes in the movie itself? Or are they defects in the self-referencing 'student's' self-referencing assignment-turned-movie script?
And it would explain something that bothered me: the student had written an absolutely STELLAR assignment; probably the most block-buster assignment any undergrad had ever written anywhere, ever. I was expecting with its impending cover-page reveal to see an "A+". Why only an "A"? Because a few... plot-holes?