POPULATION ZERO (Julian T. Pinder, Adam Levins). 83 minutes. Opens Friday (May 26). See listing. Rating: N
Population Zero is a fake documentary made by actual documentarian Julian T. Pinder (Land, Trouble In The Peace) and feature filmmaker Adam Levins (Estranged). It incorporates some footage from Pinder’s earlier work, but it’s not a hybrid. This is a totally fictional narrative, presented in the style of a true-crime TV special that no one would sit through.
Pinder plays himself, a documentary filmmaker doggedly investigating a 2009 murder of three young men in Yellowstone National Park. Their killer turned himself in and confessed but was never convicted he wasn’t even tried for the crime. How did he get away with it? And why did he do it in the first place?
The answer to the first question involves a Constitutional loophole that technically allows someone to get away with any crime so long as said crime is committed in a specific section of the park. (This is apparently real, though the loophole has yet to be tested.) This intriguing notion is supposedly the heart of Population Zero, yet Pinder and Levins do absolutely nothing with it.
The film is stultifyingly dull, riffing on the worst tropes of true-crime TV to no real purpose. Following the story, Pinder travels to Ontario and back, interviewing a number of bereaved parents and shifty lawyers played by vaguely recognizable Canadian character actors. (Hey, that’s the homicidal father figure from Killjoys! Look, it’s Mr. Baker from Degrassi: The Next Generation!)
Everything is underscored with grim music and interwoven with (equally artificial) home-video footage of the victims on their ill-fated camping trip. None of it means anything at all.
The stiffness could be forgiven if the story were intriguing – or even if Pinder and Levin were commenting on the format somehow – but there’s nothing here. I have no idea why this movie exists.
