The Setup: Man vs. Beast. Spoiler: We’re the Real Animals.
Let me paint you a picture: Peter Weller plays a yuppie with a slick haircut, a swanky Manhattan brownstone, and a rat problem. That’s the movie. That’s the whole damn thing. It’s supposed to be a psychological thriller, a descent into madness, a metaphor for… something. But what it actually is? Ninety minutes of RoboCop playing pest control with the world’s most persistent rodent.
This isn’t Of Unknown Origin. This is Of Unclear Purpose. I’ve seen more suspense in a pillow fight.
Peter Weller vs. The Rodent King
Weller is fine if you like your protagonists emotionally constipated and sweating through monologues about drywall damage. He slowly unravels while the rat—never seen in full—turns his modern palace into a urinal. It chews through wires, it poops in his cereal, it makes weird scratching sounds at night. Basically, it does what rats do. And somehow that’s the big bad here. A rat.
I’ve fought bigger monsters in the mirror with a hangover and a half-drunk bottle of Cutty Sark.
It’s like watching a guy lose his mind over a bad Airbnb review. He cancels business meetings. He alienates his wife. He sets up homemade death traps like a glue-huffing MacGyver. By the time he’s crawling through the walls like some feral handyman, you don’t feel fear—you feel secondhand embarrassment.
This guy needed an exterminator, not an exorcist. I’ve seen tougher rats working the concession stand at a wrestling show in Toledo.
The Rat as Symbol? Yeah, Sure, Whatever.
Some desperate film student will try to tell you the rat symbolizes capitalism, or fear of domesticity, or primal man’s war with modernity. That’s cute. Really. But when your movie’s villain is basically Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in witness protection, you don’t get to make it deep. You just get laughed out of the bar.
And if it’s a metaphor, then so is the turd I stepped in last week. Doesn’t make either one worth analyzing.
You want a story about man vs. beast? Give me a bottle, a bar, and a woman with nothing left to lose. That’s drama. This is drywall and pest droppings.
A One-Man Show with No Applause
The film is almost a solo act, with Weller carrying every scene like a man dragging a corpse through molasses. He’s not bad, per se—just tragically overqualified for a movie that asks him to scream at baseboards and booby-trap his own kitchen. He deserved better. We all did.
You know a movie’s in trouble when the highlight is Peter Weller talking to a rat trap like it owes him money.
The cinematography tries to be artsy. Shadows, tight framing, POV shots from the rat’s perspective. Wow, how avant-garde. It’s still a movie about a man with too much time, too many tools, and too little common sense.
Final Thoughts: Of Unknown Origin, Of Unnecessary Existence
This wasn’t horror. It wasn’t a thriller. It wasn’t even a decent PSA about calling Orkin. It was a drawn-out metaphor wrapped in tedium, padded with drywall dust and delusions of grandeur. If you want psychological breakdowns, read Dostoevsky. If you want rats, go to New York and leave a sandwich on the sidewalk. And if you want a good time, don’twatch this movie.
This movie is a hangover without the fun of the night before.
If this movie had a brain, the rat would’ve eaten it in the first act.
★☆☆☆☆ – One star for Weller’s effort. Minus several for everything else.
Just flush this one down the toilet—assuming the rat hasn’t clogged it.
