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It’s a mess of enormous proportions Mental cagewhich just premiered Netflix and it is already the number 1 film on the streaming giant’s most watched list.

Where to start, there are so many variations to go into this movie John Malkovich AND Martin Lorenzo? One, perhaps the most obvious because it is the most obvious, is a (bad) copy or tracing or plagiarism of The Silence of the Lambswith Malkovich in the role of Hannibal Lecter, the imprisoned assassin who will provide clues to a detective (the young Canadian Melissa Roxbourgh), who is also suffering from disorders from the past.

When female corpses begin to pile up in an unidentified American city, the police understand, or believe, that it is a script of an ancient serial killer. Five years ago, the Artist (Malkovich) was arrested after carrying out murders, let’s say, carried out with an artistic perspective. The corpses are presented, then as today, as if they were sculptures.

One of the detectives now investigating the new deaths is Jack Doyle (Martin Lawrence, who we are more used to seeing in comedies or sagas Bad guys with slapper Will Smith). The boy makes an unbelievable face when he discovers that the police chief intends to interrogate the Artist. The idea is: the boy must have some data that serves as a clue, a clue, to capture the photocopier. And even, in one of these, he is scolded because he tries to imitate him and is not up to his standards.

The Artist draws like Michelangelo, and has the particularity of portraying those around him with black pencil. Here I gave you a clue.

Jack hunted the Artist five years ago, and there is a death, that of a companion, which shocks him a little.

Just as Lawrence plays it serious and comes off awful, Malkovich, known for going overboard, and this role made sense for that, seems content.

All this would be the work of the screenwriter and director of this mental cage, the Italian Mauro Borrelli (no, not Boselli like the former Estudiantes de La Plata player, who, poor thing, has nothing to do with it). Art illustrator for films, from Beyond Dreams, up to The 8 most hated and the Dumbo by Tim Burton, evidently has among his favorite films the latest winner of the 5 most important Oscar awards (film, director, main actors and adapted screenplay).

But just as there is a murderer who would like to copy another, Borrelli doesn’t, he can’t be Jonathan Demme, and he copies – some will say he pays homage to him – some sequences, and even some shots. He watches as Mary shows the file to the Artist in prison, or (single spoiler, which isn’t even a big deal) as the agents enter a house to find the killer, but it’s the wrong address. Equal to The Silence of the Lambs.

But the film is also technically terrible. Look at the shots and reverse shots of Jack driving and Mary as a passenger, and what you see behind the windows is poorly resolved chroma (sometimes it even seems like the car goes faster when you focus on one rather than the other). .

The psychological thriller has its rules, its twists, and… Mental cage It provides nothing to encourage you to sit down and watch it. Even though it lasts just over an hour and a half, it feels like it’s twice as long.

“Mental Cage”

Suspense/Horror. United States, 2022. 96′, SAM 16. From: Mauro Borrelli. With: John Malkovich, Melissa Roxbourgh, Martin Lawrence. Available in: Netflix.