Canadian true-crime send-up A Thousand Cuts is more like a few dozen gentle gashes | Canada Voices

A Thousand Cuts

Written and directed by Jake Horowitz

Starring Jonas Cherniak, Storm Steenson and David Hewlett

Classification N/A; 97 minutes

Now available on-demand

In 2020, Canadian filmmaker Jake Horowitz got ahead of the spoof-movie renaissance (see this past month’s release of The Naked Gun) with Cup of Cheer, a relentlessly silly send-up of the Hallmark Christmas movie canon. Now Horowitz is back with another enthusiastic genre takedown, although its ambitions are not quite on par with the throw-everything-against-the-wall approach of Cup of Cheer.

A somewhat twisty exploration of the true-crime entertainment complex, A Thousand Cuts focuses on Frasier (long-time Canadian indie player Jonas Cherniak) and Roberta (Storm Steenson), who decide to stage a live-streamed television special investigating the brutal and unsolved murder of an acclaimed horror novelist akin to Stephen King. Their plan gradually goes awry, with several twists that are meant to provoke shock, but actually cause a handful of polite “aha” moments.

Horowitz is clearly a dedicated student of the true-crime genre, as eager to ape the addictive format as he is to poke holes in its many artistic and ethical lapses of judgment. But there just isn’t enough meat on this particular bone to warrant A Thousand Cuts’ meandering thrills, too-loose performances, low-stakes comedy and lower budget trappings.

While the all-Canadian cast is uniformly game – with Steenson, who played the lead in Cup of Cheer, the most committed in terms of energy and enthusiasm – you cannot help but think each performer was preoccupied with figuring out how to gently tweak the script they were handed. By the time A Thousand Cuts draws its final pint of blood, audiences will likely be left wondering about the weak writing as well. The film is not exactly a cold case, but it’s not an open-and-shut success, either.