This identity thriller suffers from overreliance on coincidences and perplexing cameos from Brian Cox and Udo Kier
Brothers Colin and James Krisel and/or
Actor Zach Avery must be either very well financed or ridiculously persuasive because they’ve managed to pull together a supporting cast and budget for this debut thriller that far exceeds what the script seems to warrant. At heart, Last Moment of Clarity is a slight, imaginatively thin B-movie which doesn’t so much as allude to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo as outright steal from them brazenly, ending up with a limp neo-noir that unfolds in the streets of
Paris and classy apartments in
Los Angeles. There are cameos from Brian Cox and Udo Kier, both great scene-stealing actors with many virtues other than accent mimicry, judging by the bizarre Scots-French mashup Cox tries out here that is only a hair’s breadth better than Kier’s eastern European-German gangster stylings.
In any case, each of them appears only fleetingly; the bulk of the running time features Avery as a schlubby guy from
New York named Sam who is hiding out in Paris. Sam mooches about the streets and works for bar owner Cox, all the while mourning the loss of his girlfriend, Georgia (Samara Weaving), who died at the hands of some lesser gangsters who work for Kier’s character, for reasons only gradually revealed. When he sees an actor named Lauren in a movie who looks just like Georgia, he becomes convinced that the two
Women are one and the same, and flies to La La Land to find out.