Dirt Boy

Criminology student Matty Matthews travels to a small New England town in winter to investigate the origins of a popular best-selling suspense thriller. The more he looks, however, the more apparent it becomes that the book may not be fiction after all, and that the reclusive author may in fact have been documenting his own real crimes. Jeffrey Greeley's loving photography of the wintry landscapes is beautiful, but lead actor Jacob Lee Hedman is nowhere near as charismatic as he needs to be for a film with this few characters. It doesn't help matters that the script piles on surprise coincidences at the last minute, without really giving the viewer clues early on. And there's nothing here that John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness didn't do much better.