'Anamorph'

Rating:

JOHN ANDERSON

April 18, 2008

(3 STARS) ANAMORPH (R). There aren't many police-procedural/serial-killer thrillers that can claim painter Francis Bacon, camera obscura and Pope Innocent as plot devices, or for that matter anamorphosis - the technique of hiding one picture inside another, with it revealed only by the viewer's changed perspective.

In retrospect, in makes perfect kind of sense: Det. Stan Aubray ( Willem Dafoe), polymath, alcoholic and obsessive-compulsive, is rocked when a series of copycat murders brings back a case he solved long ago. But has he seen everything with clarity and contrast? Dafoe, as usual, is terrific, precisely internalizing Aubray's torment; Scott Speedman is good as the annoying partner, Carl Uffner (even the name is annoying). And the atmosphere created by director H.S. Miller is gothic, tortured, stylized yet tinged with a classicist's sense of composition, symmetry and, yes, perspective.

1:43 (violence, gore, adult content, language). At the IFC Center, Manhattan.