Freeze Frame is a 2004 psychological thriller filmed in Northern Ireland and written and directed by John Simpson. It stars Lee Evans, Ian McNeice, Seán McGinley, Rachael Stirling, and Colin Salmon.
Sean Veil (Evans) has been falsely accused of a triple murder and, while acquitted, he is still being hounded by police and a forensic profiler who, insisting he’s guilty, want to pin the blame on him for this and other crimes. So traumatized is Veil by this continued persecution that he films himself “24/7/52,” as he says–so he’ll always have an alibi.
The film has received some praise. Critical appreciation went to Evans, who had previously played comedic roles. David Rooney of Variety said Simpson’s direction was “executed in the style of early David Fincher,” and said Evans’ performance was “gripping.” Debbie Wiseman’s score, cinematographer Mark Garrett’s choice of cameras and lenses, and Simon Thorne’s “sharp editing” were also mentioned. Kevin Crust of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Freeze Frame is a “stylish and dystopian allegory concerned with Orwellian surveillance and intrusive government.” Crust called Evans’ performance “riveting.”
Here are a few quotes:
“Off camera is off guard.” –Sean Veil
Detective Mountjoy: You seem kind of relaxed, if you don’t mind me saying. For a man who’s about to spend the next 30 years sucking unwashed dick.
Sean Veil: You seem kinda jealous, if you don’t mind me saying.
The 24/7 surveillance of the film makes comparisons with Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four inevitable. The difference is that, instead of the authorities watching everyone everywhere, and all the time, one victim is doing it to himself. BIG BROTHER IS HAVING YOU WATCH YOURSELF.
In other words, Veil has internalized his persecutors, rather like how Winston Smith is made to internalize the worldview his tormentors impose on him, and their shaming of him. The irony of Veil’s name is in how a veil hides one’s identity, gives one privacy, yet Veil would put himself permanently on display for his protection.
To make himself easily identifiable from a distance, he even shaves his head. The combination of these idiosyncrasies of his–strapping a camera to himself whenever he’s outside, his shaved head, his paranoid mannerisms, and his pale skin–make him look, ironically and in spite of his not intending it, like the kind of freak the police would want to go after.
So in Veil we see the kind of psychological damage done to a scapegoat. A man who, though acquitted, still has had his reputation and his life destroyed by the narcissism and malevolence of his persecutors, destroyed so thoroughly that his personality is transformed from normal to the quirky, socially awkward sort that makes others suspicious.
Indeed, Saul Seger (McNeice), the forensic profiler who has written a book on murderous psychopaths called Darkness Invisible, is too proud and too solicitous of the preservation of his reputation to admit even to the possibility of being wrong about Veil. He’d commit to ruining Veil’s life just so he can continue to sell books.
Seger’s narcissism is on full display when he does a public reading to promote his book…on the tenth anniversary of the triple murder that Veil’s reputation has been stained with, the killing of three members of the Jasper family (the mother and two daughters). Seger speaks with as much self-righteousness as he does would-be authority on the inner workings of the criminal mind.
Allied with Seger’s narcissism is the sheer malignancy of Detective Louis Emeric (McGinley), a malignancy so consummate that we see him physically ill, coughing blood, throughout the movie (he is dying from lung cancer). It would seem that his malevolence is turning back against him and, as a form of bad karma, making him slowly destroy himself. He is so determined to pin a crime on Veil that he boasts of the efficacy of visualization, mentally seeing Veil do something wrong to help him catch him. This is what victimizers do: project their own viciousness onto their victims.
…and when the victimizers project, they manipulate their victims into introjecting. As Seger says to Veil when the latter is protesting his innocence at the book promotion, he is in Veil’s head. This manipulative kind of projection is what Melanie Klein called projective identification, in which one does more than merely imagine another to embody one’s projections; rather, one causes the other to manifest the projected traits.
Hence, when Veil, troubled by the police in his home about a new murder accusation (that of a prostitute from five years ago), discovers certain tapes of his are missing from his vaults (i.e., those video recordings of his that would prove he has an alibi for the new murder discovery), he is forced to flee from the police, as an actual perpetrator would. Also, just like a perp, he breaks into Seger’s home and threatens him with a knife, hoping to find evidence of a conspiracy to frame him. The guilt has been projected onto him so completely that Veil is acting like a genuinely guilty man.
A young reporter named Katie Carter (Stirling) has offered to help Veil prove his innocence, though he has refused her offer, fearing that her video recording of him will be manipulated to create the illusion of his guilt. It turns out, though his own tapes (and those of someone he’s paid to follow and record him) have proven his innocence of the prostitute murder (and a faked one of Seger), that it was Carter who accidentally killed her after a failed attempt by Carter to have the prostitute steal some of Veil’s tapes in his home during an intended sexual encounter with him there. Carter thus has attempted to frame Veil, too, and she is just as untrustworthy as everyone else around him is.
Now, just because someone is scapegoated, doesn’t mean the scapegoat always acts blamelessly; and just because someone is intensely suspicious of people doesn’t mean people are not trying to persecute him. The fact is that scapegoating changes the victim, the projective and introjective identification of guilty traits makes the victim almost believe, at least partially in his unconscious mind, that he’s indeed guilty of what he’s accused of…hence, his social awkwardness, for this is what happens to you when you feel hated and despised by the whole world.
So, when we see film of him holding a pistol (not realizing at first that it’s part of a video game in an arcade), when we see a video fragment, seen out of context, of him holding a pistol he hasn’t used to shoot Seger, Emeric, or Carter (who used it to shoot these two men and herself), and when we hear him repeat, in sobs, “I didn’t do nothing” (a double negative that technically means, ‘I did do something‘), all these things come across as Freudian slips suggesting at least an unconscious belief in one’s internalized guilt.
A faked murder of Seger is set up to accuse Veil of it, since he was in Seger’s house the night before. Later, after the tapes of Veil’s hired follower provide his alibi and free him, Carter catches Seger, takes him to Veil’s home, and there with Veil, she tries to accuse Seger of killing the Jaspers (of whom she’s secretly a family member, taking her murdered mother’s maiden name to disguise her identity), since Seger had the murder weapon in his home as a souvenir.
Seger, however, insists that it was sent to his home by Mr. Jasper, her father and the real killer of her mother and half-sisters, since they were the offspring of her mother’s trysts with another man (Mr. Jasper also killed himself on learning of the acquittal of Veil, thus making him a suspect). Seger’s choice of words, in identifying the real murderer of the family, are particularly cruel. He says that the blood of the killer runs in her veins, implying she has as much of the killer instinct as her father; it’s Seger doing projective identification of his own viciousness onto her.
Now, Carter already knows what Seger has said to be true; she has just been trying to hide it. Her claiming she was sleeping over at a friend’s house the night of the killings was, I suspect, a lie. Going by her mother’s surname instead of by Jasper is a rejection of her father and his murderous nature.
Afraid of the scandalous truth of her family being made public, Carter has been trying to set Veil up with new, fabricated evidence of his supposedly murderous proclivities. Her hiring of a prostitute, Mary Shaw, in 1998, to tempt Veil with sex and have her steal some of his tapes, failed when Mary peaked in his home and saw all the cameras and newspaper clippings of murder cases in one corner of his room, terrifying her.
This collection of clippings is of unsolved cases he’s afraid of being accused of, so he must analyze them. Their being in his home is symbolic of, once again, his introjection of the scapegoating and shaming that Seger and Emeric have imposed on him. The judge threw out the Jasper case against him ten years ago because, instead of being based on hard fact, it was a matter of trial by tabloid.
So Carter’s duplicitous pretending, on the one hand, to help Veil to win his confidence so he’ll let her, on the other hand, betray him, is a case of taking advantage of an established scapegoat in order to protect oneself from such scapegoating. In dysfunctional families, one can see this kind of despicable, cowardly behaviour in golden children towards their scapegoated siblings; if one sides with the narcissistic parent against the family victim, one needn’t fear being victimized oneself.
Carter is so committed to framing Veil that, having shot Seger in the head with her father’s gun (after having thrown it into Veil’s hands so his fingerprints are on it), she knocks Veil unconscious and, when he wakes up, she’s masturbating her now-tied-up victim while on top of him so she can rape him and, once he’s come inside her, she has ‘proof’ that he’s raped her.
In this rape we have another example of projection. She’s raping him so it will seem he’s raped her: after all, sexual stereotypes are favouring Carter over Veil in this situation. With his arms and legs tied up like this, Veil is frozen in this supine, spreadeagle position on the floor, helpless in her framing of him.
It would seem fitting now to discuss the name of the film, and what it means. Apart from the obvious pun on frame (a frame of film, and Veil’s being framed), there’s also a multiple meaning in the word freeze. When the police arrest somebody, they point a gun at him and yell “Freeze!” Also, there’s one’s reaction to a danger: fight/flight/freeze/fawn.
Veil cannot fight the police and government authorities, especially without any help–they’re too powerful. He would appear to have nowhere to flee. He cannot fawn and charm people committed to hating him. So all he can do is freeze…lie there and be helpless (as he is, tied up by Carter), hoping they’ll go away one day. Those who are scapegoated often feel this helpless and disempowered; imagine how Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning must feel, accused of treason when all they did was expose the crimes of the narcissistic powerful.
To be fair to Carter, though, she isn’t as single-minded in her determination to frame Veil. She is conflicted about it, and feels some genuine remorse. She is in tears during her last moments with him. The malignancy of some victimizers isn’t as extreme as it is in others.
Emeric demonstrates the extreme of his malignancy upon entering Veil’s home one last time, assuming that Veil’s struggling with Carter over the gun is him trying to kill her, when really he’s trying to stop her from killing herself. Emeric shoots Veil in the arm, and Carter, acknowledging he’s the only innocent person in this whole affair, redeems herself by shooting Emeric before putting the gun in her mouth and blowing her brains out.
Veil has needlessly picked up her gun, weeping and saying he “didn’t do nothing.” This is yet another example of an innocent scapegoat internalizing all the guilt imposed on him. Though his three persecutors are dead, and even Detective Mountjoy (Salmon) is convinced, by Veil’s tapes, that he’s innocent, Veil ends the film still filming himself, so consummate is the scapegoat’s unconscious introjection of a guilt he shouldn’t be feeling.
Off-camera is off-guard.
Infinite Ocean 