“Committed” is a student film which borrows more than a little from the Bill Murray comedy “Groundhog Day.” This time around, the protagonist is a wife who murders and buries her husband, only to come home from the graveyard to discover her smiling spouse still alive and well. She then dispatches him again and reburies him, but somehow he refuses to stay dead.
Is this a funny idea? It could have been, given that Renata Green-Gaber is perfectly cast as the increasingly frustrated homicidal wife and Joe Knight is the charming victim of her wrath. But filmmaker Tara Pinley has no idea where to take this one-joke film, which takes an abrupt turn into surrealism before eventually dropping in the most obvious plot slot: it was all a dream. Zzzzzzzz.
Pinley has clearly been watching her film classics, as visual tributes to such diverse artists as Jean Cocteau, Samuel Fuller and Edward D. Wood Jr. turn up here. Christina Ferguson is credited with the cinematography on this black-and-white production and her work is quite good. Hopefully these two young film artists will collaborate again in a production where their sense of style can be matched with a script worthy of their combined talents.
