The Chumscrubber: Critic Reviews

A shallow, synthetic critique of suburbia loaded with more hand-me-down quirks than it can justify.

Exploring suburban malaise is nothing new ... but The Chumscrubber puts a fresh coat on the arguments.

An insufferable, self-conscious cult movie.

It's neither funny nor sad, and it's filled with cheats, phony come-ons and red herrings.

An appallingly clumsy and stupid take on drugs, kidnapping and suicide in suburbia.

An impassioned and occasionally mesmerizing first effort that's at once messier, more complex and more ambitious than many recent suburban dystopias.

A tragic waste of acting talent, with nothing new to say. Can we please now politely close the door on middle-class repression before we get really angry?

It is witty and subversive, with flashes of magical realism and apocalyptic CG that both provokes and unnerves.

A strong cast promises great things, but The Chumscrubber loses itself on the way to its indie aspirations.

Sadly, despite Bell's eye-catching performance and Glenn Close's disturbing Stepford Wife portrayal, I found this messy movie as self-absorbed as most of its characters.

Despite the top-drawer cast assembled for his debut feature, the director Arie Posin's account of emotional dislocation in the 'burbs is stymied by a fatally uneven tone and a growing suspicion that we've been down this road many, many times before.

Ten years ago, The Chumscrubber might have seemed groundbreaking. Today, it's not just unoriginal but as dull and nondescript as a Barratt home.

It's a surreal, offbeat comedy where the kidnappers are hopelessly inept while Bell feels hopelessly at sea.

Much like its characters: decorative, entertaining and emotionally empty.

Even though it feels derivative, this blackly comical suburban drama is loaded with terrific details. And it features yet another excellent performance from Jamie Bell.

Posin aims for are out of his reach and he's left to scrabble desperately for a story to plug in the gaps.

Such is the sordid state of affairs in that emerging genre that might be termed suburban noir, as it inches ever closer to horror and the supernatural.

An agonizingly bad movie.

The complex screenplay is admirable for its plot structure, its dark humour and its storytelling tricks, but the film ends up playing like a well developed project about teen-parent alienation, while itself alienating many of us in the audience.

Almost = Magnolia Pieces of April. Nice script, tight direction; but riddled with a disturbing-tension, &cynical outlook more apt to unsettle than entertain.