It is a surprise after making a number of films and shorts that show an intensely weird arthouse ethic, as well as the intelligent and conceptually challenging Shadow of the Vampire, that for his third film E. Elias Merhige turns to make a disappointingly generic serial killer thriller. Suspect Zero is not entirely uninteresting, certainly not as much as the outright hostility it was greeted with by US critics when it premiered – but it is somewhat of a comedown on what one expected from Merhige after Shadow of the Vampire (even if it comes produced by no less than Tom Cruise’s own production company).

Merhige certainly offers up a captivating opening – a bespectacled middle-aged man sits at a booth in an ordinary diner in the middle of a desert highway, Ben Kingsley appears out of nowhere dressed in black, showing the man some pictures that we never see and taunting him, before reappearing in the backseat of the man’s car as he drives away. The scene and especially seeing Gandhi himself Ben Kingsley in such a threatening role bodes well for what is to come. Alas Merhige seems to lose it after that point. The script for the better part does seem rather ordinary. It never puts the grips on us in terms of tightly wound contortions or in providing a puzzle to work out. And Merhige doesn’t really develop the suspense. There’s the odd scene – the sinister cool of the truck creeping up behind children playing in a playground and the casually understated image of an overturned child’s bicycle left with its wheel spinning as the truck departs. But in the constant jumps away to scenes seen in black-and-white or through a partial colour filter and of Ben Kingsley doing drawings and scrawling cryptic notes, the film feels like E. Elias Merhige is too absorbed in stylistic affect to draw the audience into what is going on (even if what is going on does eventually become clear in retrospect). Suspect Zero is a film that asks a lot of an audience. It keeps them at a cool arm’s length for a large part – both in terms of telling us what is going on and in terms of involving us in the suspense – and alas the eventual payoff is not quite worth it.

Certainly the talk in mid-film about serial killers hunters, FBI psi ops agents and the Suspect Zero theory do put some rather whacked spins on what seems like a standard serial killer story and make one wonder where on Earth it is all going. In the last half, the film develops a quite surprising twist [PLOT SPOILERS] – that Ben Kingsley is not a serial killer at all but a psychic (trained by the FBI) who follows intuitive flashes and that he is in fact actually hunting down and eliminating serial killers. The concept of the serial killer hunter has proven of fascination to Hollywood before – there was the rather lame Red Team (2000) and in particular the novel Thinning the Predators (1996) by Daina Graziunas and Jim Starlin, which has been optioned as a film property for some years and bears striking plot similarities to Suspect Zero.

It is after this revelation, when much of what has been happening is turned on its head, that Suspect Zero picks up somewhat. Merhige does develop a quite reasonable suspense sequence with Aaron Eckhart pursuing the truck on the highway and to the fairground. However the end is a little hokey and not quite the show capper that one expected. And it is only here that the revelations throughout the film start to seem rather contrived – all the taunting faxes to Aaron Eckhart and the zeros left drawn on victim’s bodies prove to be red herrings that have been created for the sole purpose of misdirecting the audience. This is especially so in the case of the title and the Suspect Zero theory. The Suspect Zero concept is a novel idea and one that gives one an intriguing insight into the possibility of a new type of serial killer, but unfortunately this too proves to only have been a total red herring that has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the film.