Neil Labute was for the first fifteen or twenty years of his career one of the most searching and brutal filmmakers of my era. I've seen the last two films he's made Out of the Blue and Fear the Night and they are among the blandest and most original films I've seen in his career. One is a film noir so formulaic with nothing remotely imaginative about it; the other is basically a combination of a misogynistic and feminist action film with no subtlety at all.

How did the man who has written such brillaints films that kept shockng us out of complacency become so...average? To be clear its been happening for at least the last ten years but at least he was working in TV and doing some series that were at least trying to be different. Maybe we should have known when he spent so much time writing episodes of Van Helsing that he was going soft (if that series can be considered 'commercial') This was a filmmaker who made movies that were hard to watch because they made the viewer uncomfortable, as this film and even later work like Lakeview Terrace and Shape of Things were asking questions even when they failed. Now his movies are hard to watch because they're just plain bad.

Seek this film out and try to avoid any film he's made after, I'll give him some leeway and say 2013.