Delayed Reaction: 37

The Pitch: What was going on with the people who watched and did nothing on the night Kitty Genovese was murdered?

The Kitty Genovese murder is a famous case of indifference. In case you don't know, in 1964, Kitty Genovese was brutalized and murdered outside her apartment building. It was reported that 37 of her neighbors witnessed this and did nothing. 37 is a film about what was going on in those people's lives to make them do nothing.

The film is shot like a horror movie - or, maybe not a horror movie - like a nightmare. The story is told in scattered chunks and there's an uncomfortable pause before any of the actors say anything. The color palette is musty, almost decayed looking. The actual Genovese murder isn't important to the different stories. It's just going on in the background, kind of like in a dream, when there's something incongruent in there that no one addresses.

I respect the different ideas that writer/director Puk Grasten had for the movie and a lot about her execution of them. But, the film kept me at an arm's length the whole time, making it very hard to connect to anything. I didn't buy into enough of the characters, partly because the dream state didn't make them feel real. I didn't recognize many of the actors (only Samira Wiley from Orange is the New Black and Adrian Martinez from bit parts in a lot of things), which helped sustain the unfamiliar feel of the movie.

I decided to watch this to try and see the Kitty Genovese from a new perspective. It turns out, 37 is about as useful to understanding the Kitty Genovese murder as JFK is to understanding that assassination.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend