Retrospective: Mute Witness (Patreon)

The 1995 indie horror film Mute Witness goes through three distinct phases. The first and shortest is its opening scene, a suitably lurid and unexpectedly well-shot slasher which concludes with its murder victim thrashing around her apartment as she bleeds to death, knocking over every piece of furniture she can find. At this point the camera pulls back and we learn that we are on the set of a movie, and our actress has taken her job extremely literally.

From there, we enter the second phase of our movie, in which mute makeup artist Billy (Marina Zudina) falls into a real-life murder paralleling the one in her movie — a stupid premise typical of this sort of film. We're treated to a well-paced horror movie where Billy alternately runs for her life and hides from her captors inside a Moscow production facility.

The final phase of Mute Witness is bizarre, as we descend into an international conspiracy thriller in which Alec Guinness makes a cameo shot 10 years before the rest of the movie. If that doesn't sell you, I don't know what will. Imagine The Lady Vanishes made by a madhouse patient, and you'll get the idea.