why the house?
Why did Turturro's character go across the street and check out the other house in the first place?
share[deleted]
MovieChat Forums > Fear X (2003) Discussion > why the house?
Turturro's character's "wife" beckons him out of his house and directs him to the house over the road, if I remember correctly.
share***** SOME SPOILERS *****
Well, I think it's because he kept seeing his wife heading over there.
I wondered why he found the negatives there, etc. Now I think it kind of made sense after his real estate agent told him it was rented under a corporate account. Must've been rented by the organization that accidently shot his wife. The guy who shot her must've lost the negatives of his own wife and son.
That's my guess at that.
Irene
It says right on the back of the DVD. After the cops/FBI presented him with the picture of that guy, it dawned on him that he might have remembered him living across the street. It seems like he's having psychic intuitions duringt the sequences in red. Like wheen he and the murderer are waiting for the elevator. Of course the suspicious behavior (read, incredibly bad acting job) by the murderer would have tipped me off...
shareHe sees his wife go to the house in his dream visions and the fact that he goes over to the house and breakes in only motivated by a dream vision shows how desperate he is.
share'Who knows what you may find if you keep looking', Harry says. He would have continued on his mission to find answers through every/any avenue possible - though I can't understand why the murderer would have decided to set up home directly across the street from the supposed 'accidental victim'.
shareI would tend to go with "plot hole big enough to park a car in" or whatever was said ealier. If you have to read the back of the dvd case to help with plot points something is missing. If there was a good clue for our hero to follow across the street I missed it. And if there had been one I would have been happier. Other than that I liked the movie and Tuturro's performance. He was the reason for the rental and didn't let me down.
They were killing corrupt cops in this area and chose this house to run their operation from. The cop probably had photos with him to look at while he waited to go out and kill and one of the negative strips fell out by the bed. In Harrys dreams his wife always looked at him before walking into this house.
shareCan I take it a step further?
I think the house is because it's a rental, so anyone could live there. The murderer of Harry's wife on the surveilance tapes appears to stoop over her dead body and possibly remove something (i.d.?), leading them to her address. They probably set up shop across the street to watch Harry to see if he does anything stupid that could blow the whole conspiracy...
** John Kotynek
this movie could have been great...too many plot holes that could have easily been filled in. there was a lot of time wasted with no explanations.
shareYour question actually sparked some thoughts I had about some major themes of the movie. I agree with another post on here that he was led to the house because the visions of his wife were manifestations of his intuition about her murder. It didn't make any sense to me at the time he actually went in the house, found the negatives, and examined the developed photos. However, later in the movie, when Peter Northrop, the man who was responsible for killing Claire, turns out to be a decorated police officer in Morristown and becomes a wreck when Harry shows up looking for his wife, the house scene then made sense to me. After Peter went into a secret meeting with his superiors, and expressed his guilt over Claire's accidental death, you learn that he was really sent to Wisconsin to nick a crooked cop, and by sheer reflex and accident, he killed Claire too. The movie shows just how close your killer could be, even though you may not be the intended target, and he/she may not really be a murderer. Peter Northrop was not only living across the street for the time he was sent in undercover to find and nick the bad cop, but he was also a family man, and highly respected and decorated resident of Morristown, a place that Harry and Claire had happened to vacation in for a short while. Harry ends up finding who Claire's killer is, but in the end there was no explanation other than she was just really an innocent bystander who was killed in an undercover operation. He couldn't undo what happened, or figure out why she died, because she was not meant to die in the first place. If you think solving her murder was a puzzler for Harry, recall the beginning sequence of the movie when Harry overhears the news broadcast about the murder investigation. The newcaster says that the authorities were not able to identify the crooked cop who was shot in the parking garage, and that there were wild speculations that he could be everything from an "alien to a Cuban spy". This film was very vague and hard to grasp, but I felt in the end it could be perhaps a political message about the senseless loss of lives, and the feelings of mistrust, mystery, and exclusion that surround government, state and authority figures. That and perhaps a message that tries to make sense of when a murderer is truly justified.
shareYour explanations are very kind. I wish I had your outlook on life. My heart is not filled with enough love to forgive a director for this dog of a movie.
shareHowever, later in the movie, when Peter Northrop, the man who was responsible for killing Claire, turns out to be a decorated police officer in Morristown and becomes a wreck when Harry shows up looking for his wife, the house scene then made sense to me. After Peter went into a secret meeting with his superiors, and expressed his guilt over Claire's accidental death, you learn that he was really sent to Wisconsin to nick a crooked cop, and by sheer reflex and accident, he killed Claire too. The movie shows just how close your killer could be, even though you may not be the intended target, and he/she may not really be a murderer. Peter Northrop was not only living across the street for the time he was sent in undercover to find and nick the bad cop, but he was also a family man, and highly respected and decorated resident of Morristown, a place that Harry and Claire had happened to vacation in for a short while.
Wait, wait, wait. Something I don't understand. Why would anyone vacation in Morristown? ;-) share
Seven years after your post, and 11 years after the movie. But since then Refn has made some fantastic films.
OK, I just watched this movie based on looking a Refn film library.
Anyway, All these guys talking about plot holes?? For some reason
in the last 10 years or so, everybody seems to think they are screen
writers. The term plot hole has been thrown around the most, and
also seems to be the term that is the most used incorrectly.
Just because there are parts of the movie that are unexplained
is NOT a plot hole.
It doesn't matter why or how the negative got next door.
It's assumed that the killer cop was living in the house while
he decide which cops he had to kill. While there he had some
photos to look at of his family. Back in the day they used to put
the negatives in with the pictures that you got developed, so it's
blatantly obvious that the simply fell out. Now how did he know to
look next door? Well there it gets into the existentialism comes
in. My take on it is that he is getting psychic visions from his
dead wife. He has a vision of his wife walking to and from the
house, which plants the idea.
Later on during the elevator scenes, he began to get
more of them, and also a spark of red rage, which makes him go
after the killer cop.
The ending was simple, they pulled a 'First Blood' on him, by talking to
the edge of town and telling him to not come back.
I also seems that if he did kill the cop, then it seems the others
covered it up. And since they are not evil a-holes they weren't
going to talk revenge on an innocent man.
Or he didn't find the cop and just ending up in the hospital.
The whole dark hallway and water seemed to say something that
I haven;t quite figured out yet, but I will.
Better question: Why the movie?
share"Better question: Why the movie?"
To offer some insights into a strange psychological condition, and to take us on a little trip while doing so.
Hey, guys, here's a hint for you: the film is not meant to be realistic. And the plot is not meant to match up. Because we have no reliable narrator, only a man who has already lost his mind.
I know that's hard for some people to understand, but it's been a technique used in literature for at least 100 years.