Considered a “lost classic” of sorts, Anthony Waller’s 1995 horror-thriller, Mute Witness, is now enjoying a renaissance.
A slick, Hitchcockian genre-bender, the narrative follows Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina), a mute makeup artist working on a low-budget slasher in Moscow alongside her sister, Karen (Fay Ripley), and Karen’s director boyfriend, Andy (Evan Richards). The movie’s opening scene is a brilliant film-within-a-film, whereby we see a woman terrorized by a knife-wielding escapee from a mental institution — a clear and gentle lampooning of slasher conventions that continues throughout Mute Witness, making it another meta title before Scream made the convention cool a year later.
The plot really picks up when Billy gets accidentally locked inside the film studio for the night. She hears men speaking Russian and, moving toward them, spies cameraman Lyosha (Sergei Karlenkov) and actor Arkadi (Igor Volkov) shooting a porno with a blonde actress (Larisa Khusnullina). Billy watches, at first amused, but when the action turns violent, she becomes worried. That’s when Arkadi pulls a knife from under a pillow and brutally stabs the actress to death, prompting Billy to silently scream in terror and run. She hits a coat rack on her way out of the room, making just enough noise to alert Lyosha and Arkadi that someone might’ve been watching them make their snuff film.
What follows is a classic slasher chase scene, with the men searching the building for their interloper, and Billy craftily hiding from them as she looks for a way out. It’s an extended and tense sequence executed with expertise by Waller, and it’s only a precursor to the delightful twists and turns the film packs into its hour-and-a-half runtime.
Mute Witness isn’t just a wild ride in terms of its action, it’s also by turns hilarious, in particular when involving scenes with Andy, the inept and spoiled American filmmaker whose constant gaslighting of Billy generates uncomfortable forms of horror all its own. There’s also a “Mystery Guest Star” who shows up about midway through, whose role is brief but delightfully memorable. The plot may thicken a little too much for some viewers, making the proceedings a bit convoluted, but if you remember that the point is loving homage (and sometimes spoof), rather than to create a thoroughly serious slasher-mystery-thriller, then you’re bound to have a good time with the film. —Christopher Shultz
It’s really a shame Waller cashed in directly afterward with the miserable An American Werewolf in Paris, because that project’s failure effectively killed the momentum of what may have been a brilliant career.