Piercing (2019)
Directed by Nicolas Pesce
After kissing his wife and baby goodbye for a seemingly normal business trip, Reed checks himself into a hotel room to accomplish something he’s always dreamed of: the perfect murder. As his sinister plans unfold, he soon realizes he might be in over his head with a mysteriously unhinged call girl named Jackie.
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3 films that influenced Piercing
What critics say influenced Piercing
To get the obvious out of the way, Piercing has this palpable and murder-driven atmosphere not unlike American Psycho; female victims, sticking to a routine plan, and being an adaptation of a book from the 1990s makes Piercing feel like homage to what is arguably Christian Bale’s breakout film.
Abbott conjures up terror and laughter on par with Christian Bale’s performance as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho as he balances the embodiment of a lingering threat and comical character.
There's a dab of "American Psycho" in materialistic details.
The sophomore feature film from writer-director Nicolas Pesce ( The Eyes of My Mother ), Piercing is a psychosexual thriller that shares some of the same DNA as American Psycho but is entirely its own creature.
So he concocts a plan to commit a murder, in a very American Psycho voiceover.
Picture American Psycho for millennials, with less business card panic attacks and more feminist subversion, and you’ll be somewhere in the right ballpark.
And the humour is of the nature that is sure to elicit awkward fits of laughter, reminiscent of David Slade‘s Hard Candy or Mitchell Lichtenstein‘s Teeth , both horror films where women turn the tables on men.
It’ll likely be compared to the macabre works of Chan-wook Park (“Oldboy,” 2003) and Takashi Miike’s “Audition” (1999), and fairly so: Miike’s bloody mating game was based on a novel by Ryû Murakami, who is also behind the material in “Piercing,” though Pesce’s followup to his equally eerie debut, “The Eyes of My Mother” (2016), isn’t quite as visceral.