POOR AGNES (Navin Ramaswaran). 95 minutes. Opens Friday (November 10). See listing. Rating: NNN
Fresh from the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, Navin Ramaswaran’s Poor Agnes is a middling exercise in psychological horror with one remarkable quality – the mesmerizing lead performance by Lora Burke as the eponymous Agnes.
A murderous small-town sociopath who brings men home and dispatches them just because she can, Agnes has a pretty good thing going. No one suspects a thing she has a full life, a rich social network and a freezer full of heads.
All is well, until one day Agnes takes a shine to her latest acquisition, a sad sack named Mike (Robert Notman). And, after an appropriate period of torture, she decides to take him on as an apprentice instead. This is almost certainly a bad idea, but you know how it goes: the heart wants what the heart wants.
J. Gordon Ross’s screenplay strains credulity almost from the get-go, and at 95 minutes the movie feels long: the first half, which is supposed to seethe with tension, just kind of sits there.
But director Ramaswaran (Chasing Valentine, Late Night Double Feature) understands the appeal of Burke’s testy, impatient antihero he knows we’ll be willing to overlook an awful lot just to see where things end up for her. When Agnes is on screen, nothing else matters. Lucky her.
