81) Puzzlehead (2005)

81) Puzzlehead (2005) Dir: James Bai Date Released: March 2006 Date Seen: March 24^th, 2009 Rating: 3.25/5

What first-time writer/director James Bai’s Puzzlehead lacks in originality and in the end coherence, it easily makes up for in its engulfing frigid atmosphere. Watching first-time actor Stephen Galaida struggle to sound like an emotionless blank as both Walter and his creation, Puzzlehead, is understandably grating, and yet it's also a tacky but necessary springboard into the film’s suffocating, cramped mindset. The purposefully inert plot mimics the film's android protagonist by blacking out in between bouts of skulking about. In the process, Bai conjures a suffocatingly sterile mood that makes the silence in the scene when Walter and Julia (Robbie Shapiro) stare blankly at the bed they’re about share devastating.