Surveillance is the work of a director who has made significant strides in both storytelling and control of the medium, deftly interweaving a grisly thriller, a sicko "Rashômon," a switcheroo, a psychotic love story, an imaginative paean to children, and an inspired resurrection of Julia Ormond.

Surveillance will please the B-movie crowd in theaters and on into the ancillaries

Either a ludicrously bad movie or a parody of same. Either way, it's pretty funny.

Surveillance suggests "Jennifer Lynchian" should be used for films that aspire to David's moody, idiosyncratic genius and fall woefully short.

In the end, Surveillance is a puzzle box film that has nothing to offer except the various puzzle pieces. The characters do not stand out, the drama is not compelling, and the screenplay is light on even remotely interesting dialogue.

A mildly amusing trifle with one of the genre's dafter plot twists.

At the end, all is horrifically explained, the body count inflates, yet hardly anything makes sense. In Papa Lynch's films, little is explained, yet because he's so gifted at mining our deepest fears and scariest desires, logic is excused.

The most enjoyable way to watch Surveillance - "enjoyable," in the relative sense - is to take its awfulness for granted and pay attention to everything Bill Pullman does.

The performances are dreadful, the direction shoddy and the final twist so idiotic, your mind can't help but drift toward all the better scripts just waiting, sadly and silently, for the chance wasted here.