Mute Witness begins with a self-consciously showy, bravura gesture, but it takes a few minutes to really set itself apart. Opening on a breathy, lascivious, leering POV outside an apartment window, the camera sways, shimmies, and then strikes as it, and we, get closer to its, and our, inevitable prey. Soon enough, our reflection in a bathroom mirror informs us of our obvious identity, a stocking-ed killer on the prowl. It’s a ghoulishly effective opening, but it isn’t what separates the film from the chaff. Nor is it the inevitable reveal that this is all a sequence from a film-within-a-film being presently shot on a film set. Opening in precisely this way, even a moderately experienced horror film viewer will already be expecting someone to yell “cut” from the get-go. This kind of “film-within-a-film” opening from a first-person perspective dates back at least as far as Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. And the concept itself is just Hitchcock’s Rear Window with an inability to use one’s legs traded for an inability to speak, both signaling an increased attention to the eyes. Mute Witness is, if nothing else, decidedly comfortable with its thorough-going lack of conceptual originality.

No, what separates the film is how it brings down the veil. Instead of the usual director’s voice yelling “cut,” the killer stabs his prey and simply saunters off to the corner of the room to observe his handiwork, taking out a cigarette before another hand simply pokes into the frame to light it as he watches with a smirk on his face. Then another hand enters with a swig of alcohol, all struggling to batten down a laugh. The “dying” lady is really over-selling things, making a spectacle of herself, making a real meal of the demise, flopping around every which way. What we assumed was a shot within the film-within-a-film is now just a shot within our film, Mute Witness. There is no “cut.” We aren’t shocked into another, critical perspective but surprised that we’ve nonchalantly sidled into one without even realizing.

Without even so much as a cut to separate the film-within-a-film from the film, the prey from the predator, one layer of audience from another, we’ve moved into an entirely different imaginative universe, one in which we aren’t unwilling coconspirators the camera’s penetrative gaze but giddy co-compatriots with its capacity to hide and reveal, deny and expose, to play and replay. We’re made to notice that what we are watching is a theater of perspective in which knowledge and power are always thorny and unstable, and we’re invited along for the ride.

From there, Mute Witness subtly intimates its real preoccupations, not those of a punishing slasher but a cruel and mischievous confidence game, a long-form comic sketch routine of slippery observations and technological accidents. Our straight-woman, at least initially, will be Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina), a mute (but not deaf) make-up artist presently working on a Russian-shot American horror film with her sister Karen Hughes (Fay Ripley), whose boyfriend Andy Clarke (Evan Richards) is directing. When she gets locked in late one night, she witnesses a second, lewd film being shot on the same set, what she suspects is a prank or a porno conveniently being shot by night. The mute Billy, evidently as schooled in not making noise and not being noticed herself, sidles around the back preventing a grin from sliding into a laugh, privately enjoying her own act of surveillance. That is, until the man in the love scene takes out a knife and slits the woman’s throat, her facial expression informing Billy that her fear was real, while a sudden series of cuts inward to her eyes increasingly clarify the gravity of the film before us, its attempts to convey real horror.

Or does it? Billy has to convince her friends and the authorities that this was a real kill, a snuff film, and the culprits construct an elaborate trap to mitigate her suspicions, or at least their effectiveness when expressed to the police. Her case, finally, rests on visual intuition: she saw the face of the victim in the moment she realized that she was going to die, and, she continually reminds us, ‘You can’t act that” kind of fear. But, of course, if Mute Witness works as horror at all, you can. Larisa Khusnolina, playing the dying girl for us, is.

That could be a recipe for a paranoid thriller wrapped in a cinematic auto-critique wrapped in a post-modern rumination on the limits of viewership. And, to some extent, that’s what Mute Witness is. Initially, it’s simple enough stuff, blood and guts associatively edited together with chili slopped onto a food pan. Several scenes after a character falls onto a pile of dead bodies, she escapes by falling onto a pile of discarded film reels, the discarded bits of filmed life chopped and frayed and re-edited like bodies that spell either sanctuary or limbo. These are nice, tight, classical comparisons designed to suggestively pique the critical viewer’s mind, to suggest that we’re in for a discerning person’s horror film, a film with film on the mind.

But writer-director Anthony Waller, who never read made much of his career after this phenomenal debut, has a different game afoot. Much like that opening reveal, we also slowly come to realize that we’ve been contracted to watch the wrong film. Initially sold on a horror film, Mute Witness silently but suddenly rewrites itself as a slapstick farce in a surprisingly, almost bracingly, classical sense. This is a film about people not knowing what they’re seeing, or hearing, running toward, or running away from. Hilarity, Waller deviously demands, will inevitably ensue.

Mute Witness is really a theater of miscommunications, a survey of the many ways an event can be miscued or misread or misplaced, a film where the simple act of trying to hold on to a phone while reaching an oven holds simultaneously banal or dire consequences depending on which side of the phone you happen to be on. In a bravura mid-film chase, Billy is cornered by the two assailants in her apartment. Knives thrown at her hit a painting and a piano, the latter playing a malevolent note, in what could be a slapstick Tom and Jerry routine if you squint enough.  Eventually, she turns the tables on one of them by opening a door as he is charging at her, allowing him to fall in to a tub and be electrocuted. That’s a metaphor for the film, a cinematic jiu jitsu that recognizes our investment in the genre, our rush toward what we expect, and mobilizes it against us. A somewhat lurid and garish slasher where we pray for the protagonist suddenly becomes a roguish and disobedient comic fracas where she is just as dangerous as anyone.

Yet it is our capacity for perception and misperception that is the most dangerous of all. Soon enough, Billy leaves the apartment with Russian detective Larsen (Oleg Yankovsky), only to avoid an elevator of further murderers that, unbeknownst to them, are actually just Karen and Andy coming to help. When those two arrive, they handle a goon by literally pulling the rug out from under him, before beating him with the very phone that had caused them all so much strife and confusion beforehand. Then more police arrive, and Andy, who clearly looks like a brutal murderer now, can only stutter that he’s in Moscow making a movie before quicky adding that the murders around them “aren’t a movie.” Just what movie they’re in, or whether they’re in one, or what movie we’re watching, have suddenly crumbled beneath us, and it will continue to fractalize from there, assembling nearly every combination of misrecognition it can muster. The nerves between our eyes and our brain, our ability to perceive and to understand what we perceive, is the most brutal killer of all.

Score: 8/10