- Michael Keaton and Michelle Monaghan in Blindsided
Though it was completed in 2013 and premiered on cable TV a year and a half ago, the low-budget thriller Blindsided (originally titled Penthouse North) is just now available for rent at Redbox stands, presumably because it stars Michael Keaton and Keaton’s a hot property again thanks to Birdman. Alejandro González Iñáritu’s Oscar winner was, if nothing else, a reminder of what a fantastic actor Keaton is (in case anyone forgot)—it’s hard to separate the film’s barreling energy from that of his performance, which belies a commitment to character no less controlled than Emmanuel Lubezki’s celebrated camerawork.
I’ve been vague about the plot of Blindsided because it contains so many surprises. Suffice it to say that Joseph Ruben—who directed the memorable genre films Dreamscape (1985) and The Stepfather (1987)—handles the twists nicely, having about as much fun with the material as Keaton does. The filmmaking is in fact rather elegant for a genre exercise. Ruben finds ways to play on the viewer’s expectations in most every scene, creating little bursts of suspense separate from the larger plot. Consider the way he stages a scene involving Monaghan and a corpse lying in a pool of blood. Both the camera and Monaghan keep skirting the corpse—though of course one can see it while the other can’t. For a few moments the film boils down to a single question: When will she realize there’s a corpse in the room? Ruben’s Hitchcockian handling of objects and physical space grounds Blindsided in a sense of cinematic tradition, creating a nice frisson with Keaton’s in-the-moment performance.
