
Spinning Man
Who exactly is the spinning man? Is it related to spinning a yarn, which Evan (Guy Pearce) may be doing when he claims he had nothing to do with a high-school girl’s disappearance? Is he ‘spinning’ between truth and lies? Maybe – but the most apt reading seems to come in the final shot, when a highly symbolic mouse (which Evan and his family have been trying to catch throughout the movie) is seen running madly on its spinning wheel. This, says the film, is roughly our own human condition – running in place without getting anywhere, stymied by the slippery nature of truth and our own unreliable memories.
Sounds a bit cerebral? Spinning Man is indeed a bit cerebral, a mystery drama with pretensions and a lead actor who explicitly recalls Memento, another film about unreliable memory. Evan is a professor of philosophy (actually the ‘philosophy of language’), his métier consisting of a quest for “logical clarification”. Alas, he’s also a bit of a pervert – or is he? – having left his previous job under a cloud, not to mention a “moment of weakness” with a young student (the expressive Alexandra Shipp) the previous semester. His murky past, along with other circumstantial evidence, makes him a suspect in the eyes of Malloy (Pierce Brosnan) – a cop trying to make sense of the girl’s disappearance, meaning he too is involved in a quest for “logical clarification”.
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Genre: Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Director: Simon Kaijser
Actors: Alexandra Shipp, Clark Gregg, Guy Pearce, Jamie Kennedy, Minnie Driver, Odeya Rush, Pierce Brosnan






