Movie Talk -- Deceiver (1997)
Deceiver is a wonderful crime drama about a young rich man (his father is a mercantile baron) who is being interrogated for the murder of a prostitute woman, with the use of a polygraph test. Two officers, charged with investigating the crime, administer the interrogations.
SPOILER ALERT
The suspect could be said to represent a figure of the Weird, both highly intelligent and with undertones of menace and violence. When I say, a figure of the Weird, I am trying to describe something that appears in the field of the mechanics of storytelling. A catalyzing force, an interruption, an intervention, the strangely different element that reveals the truth of matters at hand. He is, for one, an epileptic.
The backdrop of the movie is the personal lives of the two officers. The younger officer, with all his blustering inexperience, gets cracked by a bookie, trying to take a tip on a 50 to 1, and he has to cough up 20K by Monday or else. The older, reserved and moody, partner suspects his wife of cheating and refuses her advances.
The shot of the older officer stoically laying there on his back looking at the ceiling with his wife curling up against him cuts to the shot of the younger officer getting into a confessional booth and handing the priest 10K in an envelop, the 10K having been borrowed by the older officer. You can draw your own conclusions here about the undertones of this exchange.
A further twist takes place when the suspect arrives with a videotape, showing the older officer with the murdered prostitute, at her home, telling her to say "welcome home" before he screws her. He becomes violent when she tells him to leave. The fact that he knew the victim made the younger officer suspicious of him. Or perchance it was the younger officer's desire to be relieved of his debt to the older officer that made the younger officer hook him up to the polygraph test. Here the original suspect is now interrogating the older officer.
These kind of reversals may-or-may-not be definitive of figures of the Weird.
This is after a notable earlier scene from some days back when the suspect beat up both of the officers while having an epileptic seizure. So now the older officer has been shamed, both physically and morally, by the suspect.
The next shocking thing that happens is that the suspect confesses to having cut the woman's body in half, but only becuz he found her murdered body and thought that he would be accused of the crime. He thought his reputation as a spoiled rich kid with an Ivy league education would make such a thing "out of character." Effectively, he admits to being the one they're looking for, or at least for half of the deed, but at the same time not the one they were looking for. He committed the desecration without committing the murder. What could be weirder?
The suspect gives them an out, handing the younger officer 10K in cash and leaving the video tape for the older officer. But the scene erupts into violence as the older officer does not want to let him get away. He empties his revolver of all the rounds except one then pulls the trigger twice on the suspect, once on himself, then once more on the suspect.
When things calm down, the suspect says:
You said you wanted the Truth.
The suspect has an epileptic seizure and supposedly dies in a fall. He is carted away in a bodybag.
The younger officer pays back the older officer and transfers out of town.
The older officer lays flat on his back in the same position as earlier, except content after screwing his wife. She says "I love you" and he says nothing back.