A Time Sensitive Murder

Bruce Von Stiers

James McDonald is a character actor who has had guest roles on such shows as Lie To Me, CSI: Miami and In Plain Sight. Last year he had the starring role in a strange but intriguing mystery called Fissure.

In Fissure, McDonald plays Paul Grunning, a cop who doesn’t seem to be all there. We get to see him at the start of the film in some kind of self-help support group.

Scarlett McAlister plays Sarah Grunning, Paul’s wife. Aside from guest roles, she was on several episodes of Wildfire and is currently in the show Flash Forward. The audience first gets to see Sarah as a washed out, distraught wife.

Other cast members of Fissure are Jim Blumetti, Crystal Mantecon, Jane Willingham, Todd Haberkorn, Todd Terry and Noah Podell. All of these actors have been in movies or shows filmed around Dallas and North Texas. In fact, a couple of them can be seen in Walker Texas Ranger. And Ms. Mantecon played Sister Mary Francis in the hit show Prison Break.

Russ Pond directed Fissure and Nicolas Turner wrote the script.

Grunning gets a call from his chief asking him to check out a disturbance at a house. It is the boss’s way of easing Grunning back into the job after a life altering personal tragedy.

Once Grunning gets to the house things get a little weird. Nobody seems to be home. Then he finds Emma Ulster (Willingham). She is the one who called the police to report an early morning intruder. But then as he explores the house, Grunning finds a dead body.

The body is that of Roger Ulster (Blumetti), Emma’s husband and some kind of scientist. To all appearances, it seems that Roger committed suicide. But did he really? As Grunning takes a better look at things, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

But things, and time, keeps getting away from Grunning. He keeps going to other parts of the house and things are off center. He looks out the window and his car is gone. Going outside, he finds it where he left it. What is really going on?

Grunning keeps trying to get his boss to send in backup, as he knows this is beyond his current capabilities.

Going from room to room, Grunning meets the other people in the house. There is Andrew (Haberkorn), Ulster’s very angry son. Then there is Rachel (Mantecon), Ulster’s research assistant, who is also a guest in their house.

Things keep getting weirder. There is a dead body and then it isn’t there. Then it’s back again.

I couldn’t help wondering if this wasn’t all in Grunning’s mind. Especially as the personal tragedy that happened to him unfolds in flashback sequences. I began to think that the plot was really about Grunning having a psychotic breakdown. But I believe that was the intent of the film, to get the viewer off track by focusing in on Grunning’s tragedy and his current state of seemingly falling apart.

It is near the end of the film that various things that Grunning is experiencing are explained. But still I got the uneasy feeling that this was all in his mind.

Fissure is an intense psychological drama. I think that most viewers will react as I did; that Grunning has really lost it. Was there really a murder or not? If so, who was the killer and why? And if not, how was Grunning going to get right with himself and the world?

At first I was ready to dismiss this film as so much pop psych mumbo jumbo. But by the end, I was both intrigued and entertained by the twists and turns that the film had taken.

For a good murder mystery / psychological drama, Fissure is well worth watching.

To learn more about the film, visit www.fissurethemovie.com. The site has clips from the film as well as a list for it’s various screening times and locations.

Back