REPTILE - Mark Reviews Movies

Reptile, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 28, 2023

A woman is brutally murdered off-screen at the start of Reptile, but that doesn't mean ordinary life and concerns come to an end. One of the more fascinating elements of co-writer/director Grant Singer's increasingly frustrating mystery is how much attention this movie gives to the sense of the everyday continuing under such horrific circumstances. Whether that's intended to be an effort to give some of these characters more depth or part of the plot-based game the screenwriters are playing here is sort of irrelevant. In the moment, the move provides this story with a bit more authenticity than we might anticipate.

That approach doesn't last too long, though, because there is a mystery to be unraveled or, more accurately, to unravel in front of the main character. He's Tom Nichols (Benicio Del Toro), a homicide detective who came from Philadelphia to a sleepy town in New England. The guy does and cares about his job, but he has other ambitions and passions, too.

Most of those involve country line dancing with his wife Judy (Alicia Silverstone) on a regular basis. Tom is also in the middle of renovating the couple's kitchen, because the house is going to have to be nice and set up for whenever he retires and spends more time there or sells the place to find another for a quiet, retired life.

There's a moment here, as Tom investigates the scene of the crime that sets this plot in motion, when the detective notes a fancy, touchless kitchen faucet. Singer later shows Tom's face as he stares intently at his computer at the precinct, as ominous music plays on the soundtrack. We expect our man to looking at bloody crime scene or gruesome autopsy photos, but no, he's just shopping online for the same faucet.

This is a bit of joke, obviously, but isn't this the way most police investigations must play out? Movies like this so often stick to the investigative procedures and basic legwork of solving a crime. However, this screenplay—written by the director, Benjamin Brewer, and Del Toro, whose performance is so natural and lived-in that one wonders how much of the writing credit simply came from him working out how this character ticks and offering advice every day he was on set—doesn't settle for that routine.

Well, it does eventually, as the second half or so becomes almost entirely about cleaning up the loose ends of the investigation while throwing assorted twists and revelations at us. That first half, though, feels as if it's reaching for something a bit different.

The crime Tom is investigating is the murder of a real estate agent. She was the girlfriend of Will Grady (Justin Timberlake), a veritable star of the regional real estate world, who has created an empire with the help of his overbearing mother Camille (Frances Fisher). There are several suspects, including Will, obviously, and the dead woman's sort-of ex-husband Sam (Karl Glusman) and the enigmatic Eli (Michael Carmen Pitt), who has a pseudo-vendetta against the Gradys for a rotten property deal that ruined his father.

There are also plenty of motives and complicating factors to some of them, as one would anticipate from such a plot, and then, there's the matter of Tom, his big-city past in a corrupt precinct, and what could look like general disinterest in the case at hand. Is that just character development, giving us a sense of who this man is and what he wants beyond the job and what his values are, or is the script hinting at something else? After all, even some of his colleagues think Tom has money to spare on a cop's salary, and if the health issues of his boss and Judy's uncle Robert (Eric Bogosian) show anything, it's that he can't count on job security.

Such questions wouldn't even seem important, except that the screenplay seems to go out of its way to cast doubt on everything and everyone in this story, to introduce potential clue after possible hint, and to pack its second half with so much exposition and so many revelations that it's difficult to keep track of what actually matters here. Indeed, much of the backend of this plot seems to be taking multiple shortcuts—not only in terms of the specific details, but also by way of the filmmaking.

Without saying too much, there's a secondary crime/conspiracy that comes to light after the first one appears to be closed, and in the process of picking that apart, Singer allows the murder that sparks the entire plot to become an afterthought. For example, one shot, which apparently puts an end to any question of the killer's identity, is so vaguely staged that one is left wondering if it even answers what it sets out to.

It's easy to admire how Reptile attempts to do things a bit differently with a straightforward mystery, by highlighting a protagonist who juggles his involvement in the worlds of horrific crimes and the plainly ordinary. It's also easy to begrudge this movie's eventual shift toward the routinely straightforward and the unnecessarily convoluted.

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