Nick Pinkerton on 'Wild Things'

In Pierre Bayard’s 1998 Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery, a closer-than-close reading of Agatha Christie’s 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, psychoanalyst and literature professor Bayard expends considerable space on the subject of the book’s narrative ellipses, its lies by omission. These are the spaces in which Christie’s narrator, Dr. James Sheppard, who is eventually unmasked as the book’s murderer, can conceal his guilt. They are also, for Bayard, indicators of a far larger world which exists beyond the parsimonious few details that Christie, by way of Sheppard and investigator Hercule Poirot, have chosen to share with the reader.  

What a blast Bayard could have with John McNaughton’s Wild Things, a film that flaunts its narrative obstructions, is defined by withholding. These are the spaces in which McNaughton conceals his crime. As the movie parcels out fragmentary and downright deceitful information to the audience, its true narrative—that is, the information that would allow us to understand what exactly is going on and who is behind it—remains safely hidden in its ellipses. Rather than offering resolution, the final “What’s in the Box?” revelations of what was concealed in these blind spots only reinforce our sense of how little we know of the whole story. Released in early spring of 1998, a full year before The Sixth Sense ignited a rage for twist endings, the final daisy chain of gotchas in Wild Things raised the narrative rug-pull to a level of overkill that approached the sublime. But more on that anon.