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Roman is a
shy man stuck at a dead-end job and trapped
in a tedious life. The only thing that keeps him going
is his obsession with his beautiful neighbour, who
have just started to warm up to him. One night, Roman
gets a bit overexcited and ends up killing the young
woman. He decides to put her in his bathtub and fill
it up with ice. It doesn't take long before a new
neighbour catches his eye, a beautiful woman named
Eva. They start dating and everything is going well,
but what would happen if Eva was to find out about
Roman's dark secret?
Roman is the follow-up to Lucky McKee's 2002 hit movie,
May starring Angela Bettis (which by the way, I only
thought was average), and this time things have changed.
Angela Bettis is now behind the camera while McKee
plays the shy, disturbed man. So is it as good as May?
Well, the first thing I noticed was that the budget
seemed to be much lower for Roman as the picture
quality was quite poor and looked like a homemade
vacation tape more or less (in other words, standard
quality for a typical DTV horror movie these days).
At first, the quality annoyed me as I had expected a
nice-looking psycho-thriller, but just like with the
French chiller "Ils", the story was strong enough to
make the viewer forget about the quality... well,
eventually anyway. See, Roman is a very slow-paced
movie and Angela's directing isn't top-notch either
which will probably make many viewers push the stop
button after only 20 minutes or so. However, I'm glad
that I didn't, because what I got in the end was an
original and interesting psycho-thriller.
This isn't a horror flick though like some of you may
believe. The story actually revolves around Roman, a
shy man who has just killed a beautiful woman and put
her in his bathtub, and his relationship with new-found
love, Eva. Eva is, just like Roman, a rather peculiar
character. She's obsessed with death (err, yeah, it
does have a few things in common with May) and doesn't
understand why people are so afraid of dying. The
relationship that's created between Eve and Roman is
very dark and interesting. Despite several awkward
moments... well, let's face it, the entire movie is
pretty damn awkward to sit through... you can't help
but to look since you want to know if Roman can
actually find happiness with Eva.
Unfortunately, when the ending finally came and it was
time for the movie to shine, it died before it got to
the end credits. There were so many directions they
could have taken the ending and instead they decide
to do the most obvious one, leaving the viewer (well,
at least me) overall unsatisfied. So to answer the
question from the beginning of the review, is this as
good as May? No, it's not, but it's not far behind.
It's deeper, it's darker and it's much more clever,
but it doesn't have the same passion (or budget) that
May had. Still, it's worth a rent.
A couple of dismembered body parts, won't upset anyone.
Strangely easy-listening guitar music through and
through. I don't know what you call this kind of
music, let alone if anyone actually listens to this
kind of music. Either way, it served the movie good.
It was just as awkward as the movie.
Awkward and difficult to watch (for all the wrong
reasons I suppose), but too damn interesting to look
away. Roman is basically a male-version of May, so
if you enjoyed that movie, you will probably end up
liking this as well. It's darker, it's smarter and
it's definitely deeper, but for some reason, it's
still not quite as good though.
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