Freeze Frame (film)

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Movie
German title Freeze frame
Original title Freeze frame
Country of production Great Britain
original language English
Publishing year 2004
length 99 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director John Simpson
script John Simpson
production Michael Casey
music Debbie Wiseman
camera Mark Garret
occupation

Freeze Frame is a 2004 British thriller starring Lee Evans .

action

The Brit Sean Veil lives in a former, well-locked factory building and has 90 cameras running around the clock that record every step he takes. When he leaves the building, he straps onto a camera that records him. For Sean, not having a camera means not having an alibi. Ten years ago he was suspected of murdering a woman named Susan Jasper and her six-year-old twin daughters. This brutal crime still shakes the whole of England today and Sean is still being persecuted by the investigators of the time, the criminologist Saul Seger and Detective Louis Emeric. While Seger got rich from this spectacular case, about which he writes books, Emeric suffers from a terminal illness and is determined to put Sean down before he dies.

For this reason, Sean records every minute of his life and regularly shaves off all his hair in order not to leave any DNA traces anywhere that Seger and Emeric could use against him.

One day, Sean meets reporter Katie Carter, who is researching the murder case and who appears to be the first person to believe in his innocence. She reveals to him that her real name is Katie Jasper and that she is the daughter of the murdered Susan Jasper and the sister of the twins. During this conversation, Emeric and other police officers storm Sean's home because he is believed to have killed a woman named Mary Shaw five years ago, whose body has only just been found. Sean is convinced he can prove his innocence with the help of the video recordings he made of himself at the time of the crime. When he notices that the corresponding tapes have disappeared from his archive, he panics and flees from the threat of arrest. He is convinced that the police have lured him into a trap. So he breaks into Seger's house to look for the missing video tapes. He threatens the criminologist with a knife and flees again, but then turns himself in a little later.

Detectives Emeric and Mountjoy are convinced that they can prove Sean's murder of Mary Shaw. It turns out that a stranger Mary had set on Sean at the time, and video tapes showing her with Sean were found on her body. A little later the two policemen take Sean to the pathology department and show him a corpse: It is Seger who was stabbed to death. There doesn't seem to be a way out for Sean, but to the surprise of the investigators, it turns out that Sean has additionally secured himself and has been shadowed and filmed by a detective for years. The recordings prove Sean's innocence and the cops have to let him go. The hateful Emeric then tries to kill Sean, but he escapes and is picked up bleeding by the reporter Katie, who brings him to his house. There Sean experiences a nasty surprise: Katie kidnapped Seger, who had only faked his death to force Sean to confess. Now the whole truth is revealed: Seger confesses that Susan Jasper and her daughters were killed by Susan's husband, who killed himself shortly afterwards. Seger had kept this secret and continued to portray Sean as a suspect in order not to endanger his reputation and to continue to earn money on the case. Katie, on the other hand, was the one who put Mary Shaw on Sean and later killed in the fight. It was also she who stole Sean's videotapes.

Katie then kills Seger and Emeric, who came there to complete his revenge on Sean, and then shoots himself. Before that, she destroys all cameras so that Sean appears as the murderer of Seger, Emerick and her. But Sean has secretly managed to switch on a webcam, the recordings of which finally relieve him. To be on the safe side, he emails the recording to a newspaper so that the police can't stealthily destroy the evidence. After that, Sean lives his isolated life under the observation of his cameras.

background

The film was made on a budget of $ 2 million. Most of the filming took place in a former prison in Belfast .

criticism

Neil Smith ( BBC ): "After a promising start, John Simpson's directorial debut is unfortunately turning into a mishmash of overacting and a transparent story."

Ella Taylor ( LA Weekly ): " Lee Evans is wonderfully vulnerable and devious as Sean Veil."

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