(1992) This murder mystery/thriller was written and directed by Bruce Robinson. Detective John Berlin (Andy Garcia) has left LA to join the Eureka police department with his brother-in-law Freddy Ross (Lance Henriksen). The day before he's officially on duty, he finds Ross investigating a possible homicide in the local dump; in addition to a male corpse with its throat slashed (suicide?), the hand of a female (frozen?), a bloodied bra, and two dead dogs are discovered.

Berlin, trying to break his cigarette habit, gradually pulls together the clues that lead him to suspect a serial killer has been responsible for seven murders of blind women, each of whom has been code-named Jennifer. The most recent victim on record was two years ago, found decapitated with both hands missing.

However, a local blind girl, Amber Stone, who had graduated from the blind institute, two hours away by car, has been missing. Berlin concludes, though no one in the department concurs with his theory, that she is Jennifer 8.

Berlin and Ross drive up to interview the last person known to have seen Amber before her disappearance, Helena Robertson (Uma Thurman), a blind instructor of music composition and cello. Her recall of the man who left the institute with Amber is meager: name of John, smoked but used breath freshener, seemed comfortable around blind people.

A cop shouldn't get too involved with his witness, especially if she reminds him of his former wife. Just before Christmas the chief closes the case: a postcard in Braille from Amber in Oakland has turned up. After a newspaper story reveals details of the discontinued investigation, someone sneaks in to photograph Helena in her bath. When Helena reads with her fingers the postcard, she tells Berlin that Amber didn't know Braille well enough to write the message. Berlin's witness-protection program is to bring her back to Eureka and fall in love with her.

On Christmas night, operating on their own initiative on a strong suspicion without authorization, Berlin and Ross together drive back up to the institute. FBI agent St Anne (John Malkovich) interrogates John Berlin as the prime suspect of homicide, offering him a reduction of charge to second-degree murder: "I'm running out of questions, and you're running out of lies"; the evidence implicating him is more than circumstantial.

When Helena reports she's again been assaulted in Berlin's house, no one believes her, not even Berlin. "Why didn't he kill me, John?"

The ending has a startling twist but twice too clever for credibility. (Watch and compare who gets out of bed and runs down the stairwell with who ends up in the hallway.) Ross's widow Margie (Kathy Baker) bails out her brother, but we have to blindly infer what passes between her and Helena before they drive up to the institute together.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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