Pinprick (2009) User Reviews

A Psychological Suspense

[atlasmb · 6/10 · 2 December 2013]

I can understand why the reviews of this film do not agree. Not everyone would like Pinprick. It is a psychological suspense film that revolves around a triangle of characters with the relationships changing as the film progresses.

Charlotte is a teenage girl whose parents have separated. She lives with her mother. A mysterious man enters their lives and complicates their already dysfunctional relationship. The fact that a teenage girl and her mother have a relationship that swings from love to hatred is nothing new, especially if the parents are estranged. But this man's agenda is unclear.

The viewer must negotiate the confusing clues of the story and try to determine exactly what is going on. There is a feeling that one character is manipulating the others, but who is the manipulator? The game is dangerous, but what exactly is the game?

To tell any more of the story would be saying too much. I will only say that this film may not have a point of view. It may be a suspense that exists only for the unraveling.

The acting is convincing. I really enjoyed the way the background music created an ambiguous mood. But the sound was annoying in a couple of scenes, making it difficult to understand dialogue.

Peculiar psycholigical thriller

[jhs39 · 5/10 · 10 July 2011]

I'm not really sure what to think of this one. Peculiar thriller/drama starts off with scenes of a strained teenage girl and her mother who clearly don't get along driving together. When the girl is in her room it turns out there is an escaped convict dressed only in his undershorts hidden in her closet who she feeds, does provocative exercises in front of and flirts with. Given the unlikeliness of the situation you figure at first that the man is a figment of the girl's imagination, but then he turns up at one of her mother's adult education classes and talks the older woman into letting him sleep on the pull out sofa as a guest, which the daughter has extremely mixed feelings about. The only other character in more than a couple of scenes is the girl's remote, estranged father who is a doctor and who left the family for reasons that are never fully made clear. Without giving any more of the plot away by the end of the movie I really didn't know what was going on or if the escaped convict was even that, since he seems like he might actually be the most psychologically healthy person in the film. The final shot is undeniably creepy, but like the rest of the film it begs more questions than it answers. The actresses who play the mother and daughter and both excellent and go a long way towards making their characters seem credible even though none of their actions really is. If you're looking for a head-scratcher this will likely fit the bill just fine, but audiences expecting a thriller will likely be bored and disappointed.

Weird, practically inscrutable movie

[daniel-611 · 4/10 · 13 November 2012]

At first I thought it must be written by a woman, because of a dark, mysterious man who ends up in the midst of a mother and daughter who live alone... You don't know what to make of him. At first he's just there and no one can speak of him. There is sexual tension. Then he begins to pry deeper into their lives, more sexual tension ignites, then jealousy and then just plain strangeness. At this point the plot can have gone anywhere, but it really doesn't do anything interesting. There is a twist at the end that revealed to me nothing more than that my instinct that it was written by a woman was wrong. The writer must obviously be a man, I thought. And one who must think he's very clever, and wants to think he's in control of his characters, but really he doesn't know what to do with them and he never created a decent plot for them anyway... in the end he unravels them into a morass and leaves them that way. Some people might like this movie for it's suspense, but it just barely kept my attention and I was disappointed with the anti-climactic ending. It was made around the same time as Chloe and has a similar theme. The difference is that Chloe was written by a woman, so it's a woman rather than a man who is tasked with manipulating the other characters.

Not a great movie, but definitely, um., interesting

[lazarillo · 8 December 2013]

It must be hard being the mother of a teenage girl. You have to worry about drinking and drugs, bullying from other girls, boys and pregnancy. And in the UK you also apparently have to worry about your daughter hiding a naked, older male ex-convict in her closet! The main conceit of this movie is so bizarre that from the get-go it almost immediately has to be either unadulterated exploitation (the only other film I've seen with this plot is the sleazy 70's softcore porn flick "Sister Emanuelle") or a surreal art film. This definitely starts out pretty surreal, but then it turns into a more-or-less straight drama for awhile before an ending that is even MORE surreal and ridiculous. I can't say I disliked it though simply because I've never seen anything quite like it before.

After hiding this strange man in her closet for some reason, the girl (Laura Greenwood) is perturbed when her new "friend" leaves the closet and introduces himself in another context to her divorced mother (Rachel Blake)who she is at constant loggerheads with. This leads to an affair between the ex-convict and the mother, which the daughter is not so happy about. This whole thing here sounds like some kind of mother-daughter sex fantasy, but there is never really a sexual relationship between the convict and the daughter (despite him living naked in her closet at the beginning of the movie). There is some definite sexual tension, but a surprising lack of sex.

Rachel Blake and, especially, Laura Greenwood are quite good. The actor playing the ex-con is Eastern European and not always a particularly easy to understand. Interestingly, he's the main sex object in the movie, not either of the women. There is also a fourth character--the father/ex-husband--who becomes increasingly important as the movie progresses and figures prominently in the even more bizarre ending. This is not a great movie, but it's definitely interesting.

This was one of the worst movies I have ever watched.

[jimbennett007 · 1/10 · 28 December 2012]

This was one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The story was loosely held together and much of what happens lacks reasoning. I do not know if it was a dubbed movie or not, but the key characters mumble their way through this painful script to the point that you can barely understand what is being said at all. The mother does this in every scene. It was one of those movies that was so horribly bad that I just had to watch it through to the end, but it was agony. I had to check several times to see how much time was left as I contemplated watching the end or just changing to a new movie. The characters stared off in odd directions while they talked in some scenes, as though they were reading a cue card. There was no continuity from one scene to the next. How could anyone review this movie and give it more than a 1 star? The end reveals to us why we never learned why he was in jail, but I would think that a cynical teenager like her would want to know why he was in jail. Where were her friends throughout most of the movie? When the movie began, she was hanging out with friends (normal)and then they were just all gone. This movie made little sense. I could not believe how terrible the acting and directing were. The guy would just start speaking Hungarian (?) and he made long heartfelt speech to the mother that was seemingly important to her, but we have no idea as an audience what that was about, unless you are Hungarian I suppose. The movie actually had the ingredients to be good, but between bad acting and back directing, it was doomed right from the start. I will say that the Charlotte was a pretty good actress for a younger girl. The mother was almost comical as she was always on the phone doing a really bad impression of someone on a fake phone call. All I can say is "Wow, really?"

Men suck, or movies without motives are awesome.

[maxm-14863 · 5/10 · 29 January 2017]

Plot: Divorced mom and teen daughter don't get along. Strange man lives in daughter's closet and appears to be her primary companion. Strange man meets mother and starts affair with her. Daughter becomes jealous. Mom discovers that strange man lives in daughter's closet. Strange man threatens mom and daughter. Mom attacks strange man with tennis racket. Dad pulls unconscious strange man out of Mom's house and asks strange man if they went too far. Dad then bandages strange man's forehead and returns to mom's house to mop up blood from Mom's kitchen. Theme(s): People get divorced, and bad things happen. Check your children's' closets more than annually. If you only know the person's first name, don't have sex with them. Men are in cahoots with one another to make women's lives miserable and deserve to have their skulls smashed in with a metal tennis racket.

Preposterous

[HandsomeBen · 4/10 · 8 October 2020]

The mother and daughter are dysfunctional, and because they are, they make asinine decisions, then act surprised when things go south, which makes them stupid.

A daughter decides to hide a criminal on the run, in her bedroom closet. She feeds and clothes him, simply because he has a foreign accent and is ''good looking''. They basically have pet and owner companionship. I guess the criminal got sick of this and decides to scam his way into the mother's heart, so he has an actual bed to lie in, instead of a closet. He didn't even have to try hard, all he did was say the right things, and bat his eyes, and the mother was ready to move him into her house. A person she barely knows with her kid, living there. Ridiculous.

The movie itself is not good. Especially the last act, and it comes off as a lifetime jason voorhees movie, and loses steam very quickly. The first half I was really into because I was curious as to wear this could possibly go, then it's like the writers didn't know where else to go with it, and that's when it fell apart.

The twist caught me off guard and made it even more ridiculous.

Excellent Well Made Film

[NEWYORK75 · 10/10 · 16 May 2011]

Excellent Well Made Film, the acting, the directing were spot on.

A must see film, very thrilling, cool and sexy. Nice work, thank you!

The film starts off one way then ends up something else, very creepy and you wonder if the person inside the teenagers closet is real or not, and when you find he is real and he is a criminal on loose - then he befriends the teenagers mother - WOW!

What a hot mess, very creepy and cool. This film should have been notminated for something, best foreign film for the Oscars - the acting by the teenager was amazing, she should have been nominated. There are many films with such strong acting performances that don't get noticed, I'm not sure why.

I would suggest anyone who likes cool, creepy, sexy thrillers to check out this film. I also saw a film called Unmoved Mover and realized it was from the same company Mystic Pictures; they have some good films.

WHAT IS GOING ON IN MY HOUSE?

[nogodnomasters · 9/10 · 27 May 2019]

Charlotte (Laura Greenwood) is a teen girl who does not get along with her mother (Rachel Blake). To make their relationship more strained, Charlotte keeps a man in her closet (Ervin Nagy) one who is wanted by the police. How he got there, or how long he has been there, who he is, and why Charlotte allowed him to be there are questions that are left open for a time.

As the film progresses, our fugitive decides to venture out, becoming more daring until things get downright bizarre with a Hitchcock twist. Excellent writing. Good acting. Ervin Nagy gives us a creepy Eric Roberts type performance.

This film is available on an 8-pack of quirky horror films called "Midnight Horror." I obtained my copy from Walmart.

Parental Guide: F-bomb, sex, brief nudity, sex toy.

Family Tragedy...

[azathothpwiggins · 29 September 2021]

Divorced mother, Miriam (Rachael Blake) has no idea that her daughter Charlotte (Laura Greenwood) is hiding a man in her bedroom closet. A man with an unsavory past. Neither Charlotte nor her mum have any idea that when they're not at home, this man goes through their private possessions. Things get pretty creepy.

When he meets up with Miriam at work, gets close to her, and gets invited back to the apartment, it gets even creepier!

Now, hiding in plain sight, the man worms his way into Miriam's heart. This is when the story takes a turn, since Charlotte is also "in love" with this strange man.

Everything unravels and disaster ensues. In the end we see that very little is as it appears to be.

PINPRICK is a dark, morose tale with a grim, disturbing finale. Highly recommended for fans of the bleak and blighted...