In a supermarket aisle, a man takes the face of the woman dating his younger brother in his hands. His mood of confidentiality has morphed to menace. He squeezes. Her blue eyes brim. He says his piece and marches, flees really, from the store. Sitting in his pickup truck outside, his own eyes begin to well with what might be remorse — though with Caleb Sinclaire, one can’t be sure.
The title of Lee Toland Krieger’s sophomore feature, “The Vicious Kind,” does not lie. It’s a cruel, compelling journey.
Adam Scott startles as Caleb. One of the featured actors in the Starz original series “Party Down,” the 36-year-old makes an impressive, without-a-net leap into the darkness.
When we meet the eldest son of Donald Sinclaire, he hasn’t slept in a week. He’s rife with quips and fury about women and more than a bit cagey about his estranged father.
Brother Peter (Alex Frost) has brought girlfriend Emma (Brittany Snow) to his father’s Connecticut home for Thanksgiving. It’s an unfair and fraught initiation. (And it’s no help that Emma looks like Caleb’s ex.)
Why is it that so many of us continue to drag fresh lovers into rituals of family contempt? Why be so cruel?
That might be the question Krieger’s dad had after reading the script.
“He called me into his office,” remembers the filmmaker. ” He said, ‘I don’t get this; it’s very dark. I think you need help,’ ” recalls Krieger (who will be at tonight’s Starz FilmCenter screening of his film). “For one reason or another, he was thinking I was venting some sort of angst or feelings about women onto the page.”
Granted, the first words uttered in the film are not quite printable in a family paper, though they speak to Caleb’s attitude toward the unfairer sex.
Fortunately, the writer-director found a collaborator in Scott. The two agreed on the bitterness, but also saw the sad humor in the tale, Scott says.
“What compels me to take on a role is if I think I can bring something to it,” the actor said about the challenges of portraying a hard-to-take character.
“Everything I read I don’t think I’d be good at. If I feel I can bring something unique, that there’s something I instinctively feel a connection to, I’ll go after it.”
Naturally, this poses a query: What does Scott have in common with Caleb?
“I understood the isolation of the character,” he says. “He’s isolated not by choice, though he pretends it’s by choice. As a defense mechanism, he tries to convince everyone he’s better than them, that he’s smarter. In actuality, he’s the opposite. He hates himself.”
If Caleb recalls some of the meaner souls who populate Neil LaBute’s dramas, there’s a reason. The maker of such harsh outings as “In the Company of Men” and “Your Friends & Neighbors,” executive-produced “The Vicious Kind.”
Next Friday, Krieger and Scott will sit in a big tent in downtown Los Angeles, hoping to hear their names called for a Spirit Award (broadcast at 9 p.m. Mountain Time on the IFC channel).
Regardless of the outcome, the co-conspirators have given us things to mull.
Audiences aren’t left merely considering the future promise of an actor’s filmmaker and the surprising promise of an up-and-coming actor.
We’re left to wrestle — like it or not — with the wounding reflexes of the wounded male.
