Gimmick films are a pain in the ass, because the gimmickry that frames the production ultimately suffocates their effectiveness. Think of Robert Montgomery’s “The Lady in the Lake” with klutzy use of the camera as the narrator’s POV, the Ray Milland thriller “The Thief” that struggled without spoken dialogue or Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” and “Manderley” with their irritating bare-bones black-box theater settings – the respective gimmicks brought more damage than enhancement to these works.
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