Zodiac thriller L
OLA Kirke (“Gone Girl”) plays the personal assistant to Zoë Kravitz’s needy actress in this stylish, if minor, addition to the noir genre.
Director Aaron Katz, whose last film was the charming seniors-in-Iceland travelogue “Land Ho!,” has a well-matched pair of performers here: Kravitz’s Heather skates on the edge of diva-dom as she hands Kirke’s Jill all of her dirty work, while still managing to seem human. And Kirke, whose outsidery character often seems to be stifling an eye roll, is a likable guide through the plot twists that follow — but always just enigmatic enough to keep us guessing.
Thematically, “Gemini” makes a good companion piece to Kristen Stewart’s “Personal Shopper,” delving into the loneliness of a cloistered celebrity life. Here, however, we also get to know the star herself, trying to push away work obligations after a breakup. As the title suggests, Jill and Heather are genuinely close: “You’re my only friend,” Heather says at one point.
But it’s Nicolas Winding Refn’s LA-based films (“Drive,” “The Neon Demon”) that spring to mind in the neon-lit “Gemini,” whose synth-heavy score is so ominous that the film’s resolution ultimately seems underwhelming.
An act of violence in which Jill is unwittingly implicated forces her to don a disguise and play gumshoe while being trailed by a detective (a nicely understated John Cho). She embarks on a string of interviews with the people around Heather: a bitter ex (Reeve Carney), a creepy paparazzo (James Ransone), a girlfriend (Greta Lee) and the spurned director (Nelson Franklin) who gives Jill an amusingly meta rundown of how Hollywood murder mysteries work. Ricki Lake even pops up in a cameo as a celebrity interviewer.
“Gemini” starts out stronger than it ends. Still, I found myself wishing it were the intro to a series about Jill’s surreal work life. Too bad Kirke’s already embroiled in “Mozart in the Jungle.”