Fever

Alex Winter

 

Alex Winter is probably best known for playing Bill, opposite Keanu Reeves' Ted (or was it the other way around?) in the proto-Beavis And Butt-head series of Bill and Ted movies. While Reeves is back in the Hollywood firmament with his recent sci-fi hit The Matrix, Winter has maintained a relatively low profile, with acclaimed work in the commercial and music video fields.

After a cult hit with Freaked (1993) - a very loose remake of Freaks co-directed with Tom Stern - he makes his solo directorial debut with Fever in the Directors' Fortnight.

As with Freaked, Winter's bizarre imagination is very much at the fore in a macabre murder-mystery thriller which poses the intriguing question: Who can you trust when you can't trust yourself?

"My aim with this film," Winter points out, "is to place the audience in the mind of a young man who is suffering a mental and physical breakdown."

Nick Parker (played by ET child star Henry Thomas) is a young and struggling New York artist. When the landlord of his Brooklyn apartment is brutally murdered, Nick begins to suspect a new tenant, who recently moved in upstairs. But when the police come to interview the mysterious stranger, his apartment is empty. Unsurprisingly, the investigating officers turn their attention to Parker, who thus must find the killer before he is framed. But the more he tries to get to the bottom of things, the more he suspects he might be responsible after all.

"The film grew out of a desire to try and fill two voids," Winter explains, "one being that few contemporary films explore the dilemmas of twenty-somethings in a serious way. Rather, this group is usually represented by the superficial marketing of films like Slacker and Generation X-ers. The second void is the scarcity of films that rely on cinematic language to drive the narrative, as opposed to the dialogue or plot." Douglas Brodoff