A sun-burnt addition to the growing line of distant noir descendants, The Square is more of a red-faced hustle through the genre’s tropes than a cool-cheeked embodiment of the thing itself. The strain is certainly palpable in the script, a collaboration between actor Joel Edgerton and Matthew Dabner, and direction that veers in its examination of infidelity gone nastily awry between over-excited and overly deliberate. Director and former Australian stuntman Nash Edgerton (Joel’s brother) makes a tense and yet drearily unsuspenseful mash of this domestic horror story, piling bad decisions and bad luck onto a body count and pressing out something he hopes will be accepted as a modern or meta- or maybe just mega-take on the old Postman Always Rings Twice paradigm.
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In Theaters: The Square
