If the erotic thriller’s task is to seduce its audience, this preposterous film instead subjects you to a sexy ordeal that your mind will attempt to blot out later. It’s almost a match for Tommy Wiseau’s infamous The Room in the car-crash Californian melodrama stakes. But a kind of visual floridness, resulting from its penchant for the unspeakably kitsch, nudges it vaguely in the direction of competence and away, sadly, from unmitigated disaster.
Kate (played by co-director Crystal J Huang) is a modern-day geisha in Los Angeles assigned assassination jobs by a Japanese secret society. Prolonged meditation would be needed to divine what the poor souls have done to deserve it. Or how anyone could be driven to kill themselves, as is apparently the case with the first victim we see, by someone with all the charisma and body heat of a polygon character in a 1990s video-game cutscene. And then there is the mystery of why Kate takes all these saps to her ballroom dancing class – attracting the attention of a detective who for some reason asks his ex-detective friend Remy (Gilles Marini) to do some digging on her, before he even knows Remy is married to fiery dance instructor Amelia (Karina Smirnoff).
It all makes about as much sense as Michael Madsen being part of this shadowy Asian cabal (presumably grasping for Kill Bill kudos). With this wannabe high-class hotchpotch of paso dobles, private photography sessions and eastern refinement, Huang and co-director Nicholas Ryan obviously feel this is a masterclass in elegance. But that’s hard to maintain after a scene in which Kate cracks a walnut with her lady-parts – which basically sums up the film’s ruthless approach to plotting. Of course Remy falls under Kate’s spell; just the first in a grimly inevitable daisy-chain of torrid hook-ups.
Wafted along on a Badalamenti-esque synth score, Dark Feathers occasionally hits an arresting note of rarefied weirdness; at one point, a jilted shoe salesperson grabs a rifle to off Amelia – and glimpses herself through the scope. But otherwise, this self-involved and irony-free endeavour is enough to set neo-noir back a decade, if not more.
• Dark Feathers is on digital platforms from 4 November
