Paranoid quickly falls into familiar genre patterns – there’s the beautiful model who is being stalked and voyeuristically watched – a la the likes of Snapshot/The Day After Halloween (1979), The Seduction (1982) and sundry tv movies – who then gets drugged and made a prisoner – a la The Collector (1965) and sundry copies. However, the title is a misnomer as Duigan’s direction is too laidback to generate any tension, let alone a sense of paranoid dis-ease. The film does eventually develop one or two interesting twists though – like where Jessica Alba’s rescue suddenly becoming dependent on persuading an obscene phone-caller to come to her aid or the surprise attempts of the deaf-mute daughter to alert the police. There are some often subtly directed pieces – the casualness with which Iain Glen slips the cuff on Jessica Alba’s wrist and how her entire situation changes in a single moment, or Jeanne Tripplehorn’s finding the cellphone ringing and asking “Are you a gymnast?” which trails off with unnerving casualness into a conversation about how gymnasts can damage their spines.

Jessica Alba, who would later the same year become the heroine in James Cameron’s Dark Angel (2000-2) tv series and subsequently go onto A-list fame in films like Fantastic Four (2005), Into the Blue (2005) and Sin City (2005), is not a particularly sympathetic or likable heroine. There is however good support from Scottish actor Iain Glen, an actor who has always seemed on the verge and certainly deservous of but never found international stardom, and Jeanne Tripplehorn, an American actress who seems to spend a good deal of time these days in British films.