Black Butterfly (2017)

Black Butterfly (2017)

IMDB Rating : 6.0/10 (as on 12.07.2017)

Outside a mountain town grappling with a series of abductions and murders, Paul (Antonio Banderas), a reclusive writer, struggles to start what he hopes will be a career-saving screenplay. After a tense encounter at a diner with a drifter named Jack (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), Paul offers Jack a place to stay-and soon the edgy, demanding Jack muscles his way into Paul's work. As a storm cuts off power to the isolated cabin, the two men begin a jagged game of one-upmanship that will bring at least one tale to an end.

R | 1h 33min | Thriller

Director: Brian Goodman

Writers: Marc Frydman, Justin Stanley

Stars: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Antonio Banderas, Piper Perabo 

IMDB link Here

Depending on your willingness to go with the menacing flow, Black Butterfly either takes one twist too many or serves up a satisfying meta punch. Director Brian Goodman’s neat two-hander, largely restricted to a remote mountain cabin, gets location-expanding mileage from the deft performances of Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as off-center characters — respectively, a blocked writer at the end of his financial rope and the presumptuous drifter who offers his assistance. As no doubt intended, their dark symbiosis unfolds as the stuff of movie contrivance, and is no less involving for it.

In a story filled with dubious types and an unseen serial killer disturbing the rural peace, helmer Goodman (What Doesn’t Kill You) efficiently stirs up the unease, working from an adaptation by Justin Stanley and Marc Frydman of Herve Korian’s screenplay for the 2008 film Papillon Noir.

The burning question at the heart of the film’s poisonous duet is why red flags about the almost comically sketchy Jack (Rhys Meyers), with his humorless squint and fastidious facial hair, don’t appear sooner to Banderas’ Paul. It might be because a part of Paul identifies with Jack, or perhaps because his brain is pickled with alcohol. A successful Madrid novelist turned embittered Hollywood screenwriter, Paul is holed up in his rustic Colorado home (Italy subs for the Rockies), determined to write a career-saving screenplay. But on his Hemingway-esque manual typewriter (he has a rifle to match), he’s pecking out the same sentence over and over, not unlike Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

With their synapse-firing performances, Banderas and Rhys Meyers keep the viewer at arm’s length and guessing — through, and even past, fade-out.

 Read full review at Hollywood reporter