Don't listen to the negative reviews

Disappointment for a huge fan!

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

I found this a very interesting movie. you feel sorry for mason but at times you wish he would be stronger and not so weasily. amber tamblin is adorable and very good.i was hoping for a different ending though. all in all it was a good movie and keeps you enthralled.i didn't realize it was filmed in Oregon as I live there but now all the rain makes sense.if you're looking for a tense tight thriller, this is it.

First, I have to say that I picked this film up based on it's rating and after perusing the reviews here. While I was sitting through this terrible film, I started reading the reviews again, and I have to wonder if every person from the crew posted a review, because I, nor the friend that watched this with me, saw none of the good points in this film that many of the other reviewers did. It is painstakingly slow and boring with no payoff. The camera work is oftentimes very shaky and the colors aren't true. I'm not going to waste any more of my time, or yours, reviewing this. In short: It's not pretty, it's not entertaining, and it reeks of pretentious amateurishness.

A social misfit, Mason(Joel Moore), works in sales at an auto insurance company(mainly because his best friend hired and fires, Berkeley), has serious issues which might derive from psychological trauma caused by a past incident concerning his father, suffers nightmares and hallucinations involving a beautiful young woman who posed for him(he's a talented artist who paints portraits). Practically every morning he awakens with quivering hands, as if blood were on them. A light emanates from his bathroom, the door half cracked open as if to tell us that something important happened there, awaiting him.A new employee, Amber(Amber Tamblyn), starts working at the company, befriending him almost immediately, soon becoming his muse. Amber Tamblyn, thank goodness, is well cast and a welcome presence opposite Joel Moore's strange neurotic, talkative, unflappable(another way of saying she yaps a lot about any subject), glimmering, a light shining bright in a particularly dark film. Yet, when she discovers sketch books in a bottom drawer while looking for socks(her feet were cold), Amber is unnerved by what she sees. A torn page after multiple sketch portraits sends chills(especially, when this is a recurring trait in the other books)and soon dents what has been a promising romance for Mason whose quota has been on the upswing since dating her.We learn that there is a pattern. Berkeley(Zachary Levi) is an important character in that he sheds light on Mason's enigmatic nature. Mason restricts anyone knowing anything about him, and this is where Berkeley lends a hand to the viewer. We come to understand that Mason seems to have suffered from relationships which end in rejection before. This might explain the multiple sketch books in the bottom drawer, and an empty seat at the Christmas dinner every year over at Berkeley's house where a girl is supposed to be sitting.I like psychological thrillers where the protagonist's mental state is up for debate. What is real and what is fantasy? I like being toyed with and I think some good acting is on display in movies such as SPIRAL. There's a pattern in this film in regards to Mason and his muses. Amber, we soon realize, is just the recent in a string of women who enable Mason to eventually come out of his shell, he's an obviously guarded person who doesn't open up to just anybody. There are little signs as to this pattern. Before embarking on his new romance with Amber, we see portraits of another hanging on his wall. They are soon removed and Amber's portraits begin to decorate his wall. Berkeley is the character who knows Mason best(they've been lifelong friends), and has been loyal to him even when he doesn't need to be. That loyalty has surely been tested in the past and SPIRAL shows that it'll be once again.A trip to the cemetery to visit his mom's grave provides a nice homage to Hitchcock's umbrella scene in FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT(or if that wasn't their intention, this overhead shot of a little boy moving through a crowd in a memory flashback sure reminded me of it). Joel David Moore and Adam Green(the two collaborated together on the slasher homage, HATCHET) do an effective job of following a tormented man through an up and down time in his life, burdened by night terrors and specters that may or may not involve him, and how the frown turns upside down when a new girl enters his life. The tragedy is we must acknowledge that we can not always trust our eyes since Mason is the person we follow. Joel Moore(who co-directed)is an actor I'm very fond of because I think he's great at portraying eccentric characters(I also think he's a very funny guy who can play weirdos very effectively)and SPIRAL might just be his best performance to date. His idiosyncrasies(the devotion to jazz, the insistence of not revealing his sketch work to his muses, as Amber wants to see her portraits as Mason is working on them)are interesting to see develop through Moore's performance. I just like Tamblyn in this film, her kind of character I easily embrace because she's so upbeat and charges the battery of what could've been an otherwise dreary overall experience. She portrays the "too good to be true" character which in itself could be telling.

OK, we got JP from Grandma's Boy and Chuck from, well Chuck. I thought this movie would be quite good based on the reviews, and it did start out pretty high on my movie scale, but about halfway through it was just dragging out for so long I kept losing interest. I actually got so bored, probably because you can see right away what's going to happen in the end; the story is actually quite thread-bare, I skipped over 15 minutes and didn't miss a thing! This film should have been a short work, maybe around 45 minutes to an hour max. It starts out good and finishes good, too bad the filling is bland, boring, dull, and lacks everything but time. Some people say they like it for the music; I don't care for jazz and I don't go see movies for their score, I go for the story and when that's drawn out... well, ratings drop in my book.Bottom Line: Good open, great close, boring filler. Story was cool, but if you don't know what's going to happen a quarter of the way through, you haven't seen too many thrillers.