It’s something that has repeatedly happened over the years. Legendary director Brian De Palma released a new movie that was shrugged off as a minor work from the filmmaker despite its singular vision and meticulously crafted set pieces. This spring when De Palma’s Domino was released in select theaters and VOD, I, too, thought the film was a minor work from De Palma that featured two incredible sequences. I can’t believe that I, an absolute De Palma fanatic, made the same mistake that so many others had made. I undervalued a new De Palma flick. Revisiting Domino for its Blu-ray release, I was struck that De Palma has once again made an absolute killer thriller, a cynical film with strong political overtones and the director’s incredible knack for crafting suspense in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock. Simply put, despite what anyone has said, Domino rips.

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The screenplay for Domino by Petter Skavlan taps right into Brian De Palma’s cynicism, especially when it comes to American international interventionism. Look throughout De Palma’s filmmaking career and you see example after example of this robust skepticism about America’s ability to dictate its wishes to the world and Domino fits right in that mold, embodied by the brash, outlandish performance by Guy Pearce. Within the world of Domino, which is set in 2020, the reality of American involvement means that a rather simple murder case becomes increasingly complicated, with the CIA pull string behind the scenes and creating layers of distrust even amongst allies.

The way in which Domino features Islamist terrorists has caused a bit of an uproar because of the stereotypical nature. But De Palma injects a few wrinkles that take the director deeper into what terrorism truly is. He’s not interested in the religious motivations for terrorism, but how technology and visual storytelling can be used to spread the horror. Al Din and his cabal of terrorist cohorts speak of their religious jihad but they’re more focused on creating glossy portraits of terror, sensationalized videos of violence that will dominate news cycles and spread on the internet. De Palma is fascinated to see how easily his beloved visual medium can be utilized to spread evil.

Unfortunately, behind the scenes issues between the producers and De Palma have led to the director to all but abandon his film. The Blu-ray for Domino sadly boasts no special features. While one of the great American filmmakers continues to languish outside of the Hollywood system, he proves once again that when given the resources he can craft a sequence as good if not better than anyone. Domino is another highly cinematic work from Brian De Palma that dives into themes that the director has been exploring throughout his career, going all the way back to his breakthrough hit Greetings in the ‘60s. Time will tell if people finally get around to catching up with Domino, but I have a feeling that De Palma’s latest will build its dedicated cult following as it shows once again the master hasn’t lost his touch.

Dave Taylor, Dad at the Movies

This genre is propelled by action sequences, and director Brian De Palma offers up some exciting set pieces, first with the attack that results in Lars’ death and a 007-worthy rooftop chase, then a gripping sequence at Spanish bullfight. The film itself is typical De Palma too, self-conscious of its medium even as it’s slyly self-referential. For example, a video posted by the terrorists is analyzed by the police for its use of camera angles and sophisticated cinematography techniques. Later, one of the terrorists attacks a film festival in a sequence told through video sequences watched on various computer laptops, a film-within-a-film.

Eriq Ebouaney has so much presence on camera that I also really wished for more of his story, more about Ezra Tarzi, his family, and how he ended up stuck in the middle between the Danish police, the CIA and ISIS. He’s an actor to watch, for sure, and has already had great success in Three Days to Kill, Kingdom of Heaven and Hitman.

Still, there’s a lot wrong with this story, not the least of which is that Christian is a miserable cop, so busy saying goodbye to his female friend that he forgets his gun as he heads out on patrol. He’s later suspended from the police force for such negligence, but that entire sequence – and its consequences in the subsequent story – are quickly subsumed and never appear again in the narrative. There are also long periods when Christian and Alex are driving or tailing the terrorists where there’s a weird absence of dialog. Moody? Yes, but in the “are we there yet?” sense.

What’s more frustrating is the lazy and somewhat insulting tendency of De Palma to zoom in on something to clue us in that it’s important to the story. This doesn’t just happen once (gun on table, cut to naked woman, cut to Christian walking out the door, cut and linger on gun still on table) but recurs throughout the film. Entirely suitable for manga, it’s a pet peeve of mine in cinema. Let us figure it out, don’t break the narrative with these foreshadowing close-ups or oh-so-obvious placements on camera.

There are a lot of pretty awful movies out there, however, so in the end I would assess Domino as a B grade film. If you like actioners, if you’re a big fan of Coster-Waldau (I am!) and van Houten (I am!), if you are a Brian De Palma completist, or you’re just looking to burn a few hours, Domino is mostly well assembled and muchly fun to watch. I’m just hoping for the director’s cut that chops out some of the banal elements and smooths the many narrative hiccups and cuts to weave the main story with the many secondary narrative elements. Now that would be a really good cop film.

Relegated to a VOD release, final cut snatched from its director [*questionable statement], bearing the marks of a rushed and underfunded shooting-schedule, and visually incomplete to boot, Brian De Palma’s DOMINO has all the warning signs of a real cinematic disaster. And yet, the experience of watching the film is, at times, at odds with these facts.

For all its occasional jankiness, DOMINO begins brilliantly. Set in Copenhagen, in 2020, nondescript cop Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his partner Lars (Soren Malling) are called to an apparent case of domestic violence. This scene is preceded by an extended shot, in Christian’s apartment, which provides a crucial detail: he has left his gun behind. As they enter the lift, they bump into Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), whose feet are wet with blood. He stabs Lars in the neck, and a VERTIGO-quoting rooftop chase is initiated, ending with Ezra captured by CIA (led by an enjoyably hammy Guy Pearce), and Christian dealing with the aftermath of his friend’s attack.

Ezra, who is an ISIS-affiliated terrorist, becomes a brutal enforcer for the CIA in Denmark, depicted as an EU police-state under the Americans’ watchful aegis. Christian, meanwhile, is reprimanded for forgetting his gun and begins investigating the terrorist network (operating as fast-food sellers, hiding explosives in tomato crates) with Alex (Carice van Houten), whose motivations are more tangled than they first appear.

Much of this – the ‘drama’ – is plainly bad; many scenes are staged with a perfunctory, even bored, eye-rolling manner, others are barely colour-corrected; the high-strung score is ramped up to alert you of some impending action, only emphasising how dull what’s happening presently is; and the performances are hilariously, stoically wooden. Coster-Waldau particularly seems to have been inspired by Ben Affleck’s turn in Terrence Malick’s TO THE WONDER: he’s a living slab, essentially part of the scenery — he can run, he can fight, he can look vaguely in the direction of another actor in a scene, but can he emote? Are you joking? No chance.

But, should you be able to suffer through this, there are shots, sequences, scenes which demonstrate that unmistakable and inimitable De Palma touch. This is another way of saying that the director’s ‘provocative’ — a dread term — leanings are in evidence here, and they are as nasty, irresponsible, precisely articulated, and expressive as ever.

De Palma strikes at where we live – he sets fire to shit-filled bags and leaves them at our complacent doors. DOMINO is another instalment in the director’s filmography concerned with our relationship with images and screens, how people can be lured into a false sense of security, or panic, by the manipulation of media. The key sequence here is one which depicts, in split-screen, first-person-shooter fashion, a terrorist attack on a film festival red carpet. The nauseating effect of the POV is doubled when it occurs to you that this might be, in a compartmentalised way, wish-fulfilment on the director’s behalf. The sequence calls to mind the unbelievable “Be Black, Baby!” sequence from De Palma’s HI, MOM! for its sheer in-your-face outlandishness.

The finale, set in an Almeria bull-fighting stadium, becomes a mission to stop both an atrocity on Spanish soil and the recording, for propagandistic purposes, of that atrocity. It’s an incoherent set-piece, for sure, but it’s assembled so beautifully with such attention to tension, recalling the structures of the delirious, musical sequence-making of DRESSED TO KILL, BODY DOUBLE, and FEMME FATALE.

Only those compelled by a sense of auteurist completionism will end up letting DOMINO into their eyes and ears, which is, in a limited way, a shame: because, despite the obvious truncated and distorted nature of the film, the marks of De Palma’s authorship are still visible, and still pleasurable. It’s all here: the ominous zooms, the axial cutting, the split-diopter shots, the mystifying chutzpah; and, to save the best until last, it’s good to note that when De Palma the sequence-constructor is allowed to emerge from the movie’s cracked casing, he can still sing.

White then lists, alphabetically, "the year’s best so far," and includes Domino, writing, "Brian De Palma’s B-movie dreamscape about global distress, is uncomplicatedly political and the best kind of comeback: driven by compassion."

A couple of weeks ago, World Of Reel's Jordan Ruimy posted the results of a "critics poll," finding that Jordan Peele's Us was "named best movie of 2019 (so far) according to over 150 critics." While Armond White was not one of the "film critics, journalists, bloggers and entertainment reporters" who were polled, there was one participant who included Domino in his top five: James Morrison, a film historian at Claremont McKenna College.

Roderick Heath, This Island Rod

Despite De Palma’s best efforts with lighting and art direction, the photography can’t shake off the bland clarity of much low-budget, digitally shot cinema. But as happens all too often with contemporary cinema, that’s mistaking the wrapping for the actual gift. Domino proves a galvanising experience in regards to the current movie scene, as pure an auteurist artefact as any I’ve seen and one that, in its way, recalls many a late B movie excursion from the major talents of a much earlier filmmaking generation: Fritz Lang or Edgar G. Ulmer would have entirely understood Domino.

De Palma uses Peter Skavlan’s script as a springboard for suspense sequences composed with a lucid sense of staging and context that’s close to miraculous compared to the vast numbers of barely competent directors around today. Even seemingly serviceable early scenes prove charged with careful investment of meaning. One of De Palma’s most accustomed and compulsive motifs – a man who misses an important detail because he’s too wrapped up in a woman – is quickly deployed as Christian’s fatal failure to bring his gun is put down to his being drawn back into bed by the barista he’s boffing. De Palma cuts to Lars smoking silent and alone in his kitchen, seemingly a portrait of a different kind of angst: we’ve seen Lars with his limping wife Hanne (Paprika Steen) in homey security, one into which Christian is regularly invited without having or wanting, but as the story unfolds it’s revealed that Lars, like his partner, has his mind on a woman and not on the world immediately about him. When Christian dines with Lars and Hanne in their kitchen, Hanne shows Christian a magazine ad for a dream vacation: De Palma frames the seated man, the standing woman, and the large crucifix on the wall to composite a vision of competing modes of existence, domesticated life as a perpetual scene suspended between rigid internal faiths and far-flung fantasies. You can feel Christian all but cringing at the faint touch of its weight.

Christian learns later that Lars was having an affair with Alex, a turn that genuinely shocks Christian nonetheless as he had no idea about it, the presence of such enigma right next to him outweighing the machinations of spies and fanatics around him. Domino revolves around two sequences of expansive and carefully layered suspense-mongering: the first is Christian and Lars’ pursuit of Tarzi and the second a climax as Christian and Alex try to foil one of Al Din’s intended terrorist attacks in Spain. The first sees De Palma reverting to his classic blueprint of taking some Hitchcock quotes – the spiralling staircase and drainpipe-dangling of Vertigo (1958), the stepping-stone zoom on a gory sight of The Birds (1963) – and improvising around them jazz-like. De Palma’s more individual sense of crisis then comes into play, as something terrible and impending is made obvious to the audience but only unveiling itself to his protagonists as events outpace their receptivity. Christian beholds the mangled result of Tarzi’s vengeful handiwork inflicted on some pathetic Al Din operative whilst Tarzi calmly tries to work his escape from his handcuffs under Lars’ nose.

Colossal close-ups link the corporeal savagery of Tarzi's handiwork with the silently knowing glaze to his eyes, plunging us deep into a zone of near-atavistic vengefulness and determination the cops can barely comprehend at this point. It takes raw loss of both a friend and innate self-respect to galvanise Christian, who spends much of the film looking like a waning golden boy faced with proof of his own ridiculousness, into the potent warrior such a quest requires. His chase of Tarzi over roofing shingles has an almost languorous quality as the two men are obliged to be more careful than speedy, Lars watching his partner wane and bleed from a helpless vantage. The storyline revolving around a clash between terrorists and state power with a vigilante and civic guardians caught in between feels, perhaps inevitably given the film’s delay, ever so fractionally past its prime. Pearce’s portrayal of a strutting, arrogant yuppie in patriot garb hits a note that’s been sounded quite a few times in the post-9/11 critique.

And yet the direction De Palma takes it in proves almost maliciously keen to our moment when events like the Christchurch Mosque shootings evince just the sort of psychopathic showmanship staged as a social media event De Palma depicts here. Much as he signalled with less finesse and wit in Redacted (2007), De Palma approaches the fallout of the War on Terror with an eager comprehension of a fight on multiple plains of action, enabled by technological advancements that allow simultaneity of being and seeing. Al Din’s auteurist approach to terrorism is to carefully stage them with body cams and drone photography to make them orchestrated events of propagandistic violence. De Palma correlates his own directorial vision with such excursions, as Al Din coaches a hijab-wrapped starlet, Fatima (Sachli Gholamalizad), for a red carpet debut, albeit one where she’s required to machine gun arriving stars at a Dutch film festival, before detonating an explosive vest for a big bang finish, bringing death to the celebrities and being one at the same time. Al Din watches from on high, footage beamed back to him allowing him to see Fatima's pained yet determined war face in the same frame as the fear and horror of her victims -- an image De Palma might as well have been working towards his whole life.

The captured footage is then edited into a tight unit of cinematic impact for free dissemination online, an agitprop creation that long outlives its makers, allowing the deed to escape the ephemeral and the specific moment to become an ongoing act of radical violence. All barriers between political act and art have vanished. By contrast Martin, who in De Palma’s paradigm can be seen more as an eager studio executive, uses networked screens to torment Tarzi into cooperating by letting him watch as Martin browbeats his son. Christian and Alex untangle the means of Al Din’s seeming ability to stage such events at will as based in deception and irony – the tomatoes that save Christian’s life are also a means of smuggling weapons. But Tarzi has a deep instinctual and procedural advantage over them, an advantage that Martin trusts in through his believe that revenge is the great motivator. Ebouaney’s presence as Tarzi imbues Domino with some interesting implied political perspective, as it subverts the familiar paradigm of white westerner reprisal for Islamic extremist carnage by noting that people in North Africa have suffered much more at the hands of such movements.

At the same time De Palma regards Tarzi as a monstrous by-product himself, as a man pushed to realise the possibility within himself for intimate and sadistic violence to expiate grief and rage, slicing off fingers and drowning a restaurateur in his own saucepan full of soup: he’s reminiscent of such storied De Palma protagonists as Winslow Leach, Carrie White, and Tony Montana. In contrast to them however he doesn’t hold the centre of the narrative. There’s also the attendant irony of oblique forms of retaliation: Tarzi’s programme of payback stirring an equal and attendant desire for Christian and especially Alex to get even with him. Christian soon finds that a superior who seems to have it in for him is actually one of Martin’s enablers. He and Alex follow the thread to Belgium and then Spain, proving their mettle as partners as they cut loose on some punkish miscreants, establishing Alex’s highly effectual way with a kick to the balls. Domino has many of the qualities old B-movies often wielded with careless gusto. The to-the-point narrative feels almost radical and certainly refreshing in its unfussy cohesion, the directness of its themes and characterisations. The revelation of Alex and Lars’ affair is offered not to implicate some mind-bending twist but to lend new volatility to the way character and plot interact.

The finale, where Al Din tries again to orchestrate a suicide bombing as media event in a bullring, sees multiple plains of action and interlocking events staged with ingenious verve, Christian battling Al Din and operatives on high whilst Alex tries to intervene with the bomber below, action bathed in saturating blue neon from a huge logo sign that renders life-and-death struggle a form of branded content. It’s truly striking how sleek and integral this is compared to the superficial but disjointed imitation of De Palma’s kind of high style in something like Atomic Blonde (2017). De Palma again explores variations on some of his earlier set-pieces, particularly the opening of Femme Fatale (2001) and the finales of Blow Out (1981) and Snake Eyes (1998), with evil defeated by a combination of real grit and a dash of absurdist good fortune. The cycle of revenge moves on another notch, if perhaps with the hope of catharsis, but the art of murder continues to resound across cyberspace to an unknowable end. It could be said that Domino crashes to a halt just as it’s really gathering momentum, but again the pithiness of the film, the absence of narrative gimmicks and overworked dramatics, feels more like a plus in the end. Also it’s a potent reminder of what genuine film style looks like. De Palma might be one of the last remaining filmmakers who still readily and casually shows up the difference between merely showing events in a televisual manner or assembling prettily photographed bits, but actually turning them into a truly cinematic, aesthetic event.

There are many things in our world that are illegal—for example, the murders committed by terrorists. They nevertheless happen. There are others that, though they’re legal, are unthinkable—for example, movies that depict the cruel determination and the shocking desire to murder in a theatrical way of Islamic terrorists. De Palma is the only one of the famously transgressive directors of the once famously transgressive liberal movements in the arts who actually has transgressed...

...The extraordinary moments come when De Palma is in his element—when he can think about the relationship between technology, entertainment, and morality. He uses his split screens to show that behind suicide bombers are people who play movie director with people’s lives and whose purpose is not only to terrify, to use the media against the democratic countries they’re supposed to serve, but also as advertising. To glamorize evil.

De Palma’s humanism shows in his constructing a plot intended to destroy this attempt at glamorization. He acknowledges our public paralysis and lack of serious, believable public speeches by politicians and intellectuals. Instead, he moves to family and friendship, to love and loyalty as motives of action. In this way, the dignity of human action is affirmed, even when faced with the anonymous, impersonal terrorist threat.

At the same time, he shows the potential for tragedy in our societies and wars, with his trademark sophistication. Far from the liberal bromide that violence is never the answer, De Palma makes a movie that insists if you want to grieve for your losses, if you want therapy, you should do justice. The political character of the action of the plot serves to make up for the impersonal character of terrorism—the victims can experience it as random, as though it were a cosmic accident, not an act of war.

De Palma’s everymen achieve a dignity only possible in genre movies—they take personally what happens to them in a plot that allows a resolution. They don’t need to escape into fantasy to avoid the ugliness of the world and have an incoherent happy end simply tacked on. Blockbusters no longer dare to tell such stories. So it makes sense Domino was beset with production and distribution difficulties, almost silenced before it even reached an audience. His political incorrectness is serious, and so his art is marginalized.

Varese Sarabande will release a soundtrack album for Brian De Palma’s action thriller Domino. The album features the film’s original music composed by Pino Donaggio (Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Blow Out, The Howling). The soundtrack will be released digitally tomorrow, June 14.

Meanwhile, you can still listen to Donaggio's entire Domino soundtrack at Music.Film.

How did the idea of ​​"Domino" come about?

I wanted to write a thriller about how apparently unrelated incidents were interconnected, through a sort of domino effect. For example, a murder in Copenhagen may be linked to a terrorist attack in a small Spanish town. I also wanted to examine the primordial concepts of revenge and guilt. Before Brian got on board, the script was a darker and more intricate story. Some of my dominoes have been removed, creating a simpler and more linear plot that best suited his vision of the film.

What research did you do for this story?

In today's society, just follow the news on the news to find a story like this. Terrorist attacks are not only documented by news agencies, but also by terrorists themselves, so news and propaganda often intersect. Dozens of books on European terrorism have been written - and I've read several. I also spoke to specialists in international terrorism, such as Thomas Hegghammer, who gave me invaluable advice.

Are there details in the script that reflect your Scandinavian background?

As a Norwegian, it was natural for me to use Scandinavia as setting for some parts of the film. Copenhagen is the most international and photogenic city among Scandinavian cities - and since Nikolaj lives in the city, it was a breeze to set the story there. Working with Danish producer Michael Schønnemann was another reason for Copenhagen to play an important role in the story.

What are the dangers of writing about terrorism?

Writing about terrorism, partly from the point of view of terrorists, is a potential minefield. Terrorists, as instigators of violence, are the antagonists by nature. But in Domino the protagonists are imperfect and therefore the boundaries between good and evil, right and wrong, are not outlined.

What was it like working with Brian De Palma?

Working with a legendary director like Brian De Palma was an incredibly interesting privilege. Although I felt the need to adapt my existing script to his vision of the film, he always made sure that the heart and soul of the story remained intact. He is very sharp and analytical, and a true gentleman in the creative process.

Beginning with a rooftop chase that evokes Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the latest from Brian De Palma plunges Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s hapless Copenhagan cop into a complex plot involving CIA skullduggery courtesy agent Guy Pearce and high-tech jihadists with machine-gun-mounted livestreaming cameras. A go-for-broke genre exercise featuring stunning set pieces at the Netherlands Film Festival and a Spanish bullfight, which finds the ever-provocative De Palma exploring the correlation between terrorism and filmmaking. “The death-dealing, all-voyeurism-all-the-time world that De Palma has been imagining in some form or another since the late ’60s, has, he recognizes, finally come into actual being, and it’s worse than he, or anyone, ever imagined.”—Glenn Kenny, The New York Times