CLEAN SHAVEN

Here is the honest tension. This is, by our own measure, a well-made film — three stars' worth of real craft. And it is a movie we cannot recommend to you.

The story follows a deeply disturbed man whom the filmmaker implies may be a schizophrenic serial killer of children. It is bizarre, punishing, and — by the source's judgment — morally and spiritually lacking, void of any positive content. The excellent filmmaking doesn't redeem it; it only makes the emptiness more vivid.

There is disturbing violence, self-mutilation, a graphically chilling autopsy, harsh language, and a gratuitous fornication scene. There is no hope on the other side of any of it. So the answer is simple: skip it. Well-made and not for you is a true sentence, and this is a film it describes exactly.

In what looks like a rural seaport town, a deeply disturbed and tormented man named Peter Winter (Peter Greene) moves through a world he can barely hold together.

His mind is tortured by thoughts he cannot control. He is also obsessed with finding the daughter he lost to adoption as an infant — a child now deliberately kept from him. The filmmaker keeps circling the question of who Peter really is, and how dangerous, without ever fully answering it.

Three stars, and they belong to the making, not the meaning. Lodge Kerrigan's directing is very creative: interesting camera angles heighten the film's effect, and rapid scene changes seize your attention.

The acting matches it. Peter Greene is superb as the disturbed Peter Winter — his anxiety is felt, literally and physically, throughout. That is real accomplishment.

But the storyline is a different matter. It is bizarre, and its entertainment value is severely marred by disturbing violence, foul language and fornication, along with the confusion of plot elements the film never bothers to address. Skilled hands, empty film.

This film believes in nothing it can offer you. Its worldview is humanism reflecting the twisted, murderous behavior of a dangerous schizophrenic — a portrait of torment with no framework of meaning around it, no redemption reached for, no light let in. The source calls it morally and spiritually lacking and void of any positive content, and that is the whole of its philosophy: suffering observed, and left where it lies.

A biblical view does not deny that such torment exists. Scripture is unflinching about a mind at war with itself and a world capable of great darkness. What Scripture refuses to do is leave a person there without hope. This film offers no answer to the anguish it depicts — only the anguish. That absence is precisely why it fails a viewer who needs somewhere to stand.

There is a longing buried even here: the buried ache of a father searching for a lost child. Scripture takes that image and turns it inside out — not a broken man hunting a daughter he cannot reach, but a Father who goes out after the lost and finds them. "For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found" (Luke 15:24).

Talent, yes — real directing and a superb lead performance. But it's poured into a bleak, disturbing story with nothing hopeful underneath and a great deal you'd rather not see. So our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something worth your evening instead? Start with our latest family-friendly picks.