The low-budget drama Gemini (which is currently playing at the Arclight and the AMC River East) is a 93-minute wisp of a movie that doesn’t seem to unfold so much as evaporate. Writer-director Aaron Katz (Quiet City, Cold Weather) establishes up some plausible relationships and a fairly grounded sense of place; he also makes a half-hearted attempt at telling a mystery story. But the mood is so languid that it overwhelms anything else—aiming for a tone poem on the emptiness of fame a la Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere or The Bling Ring, Katz just delivers emptiness. Still, I’m glad the movie exists; I’d sooner watch an honest and sensitive failure than a cynical and calculated one like Eli Roth’s recent Death Wish remake.
The next morning, Jill arrives at Heather’s home and finds the actress dead—shot with Jill’s gun. The police arrive and immediately treat Jill with suspicion. John Cho, playing a sensitive chief detective, plays nicely off Kirke in an interrogation scene that doubles as a bit of character development. He asks Jill what she wanted to do when she was a teenager. (“You didn’t always want to become a personal assistant, did you?”) It’s a reminder that Jill’s identity had been defined by her connection to someone else. With Heather dead, Jill isn’t just out of a job—she has to redefine who she is. Jill decides to put off this personal reckoning by investigating who killed Heather so she can clear her name.
