Arthur Bretnik is a private detective who has received an invitation to investigate a mysterious murder that took place in the small town of Wonder. But with every passing day in the investigation, Bretnik becomes more and more convinced that this tragic incident is connected with a conspiracy, because of which his nefarious daughter died.
The film is shot in the style of psychedelic art house and with references to Fox Mulder and Dana Scully from The X-Files. This unique detective story tells the story of a mentally ill detective investigating crimes committed in a small town that has become the center of government experiments.
The film begins promisingly, mixing detective story with sci-fi, but soon changes style, moving into the arthouse and adding psychedelic elements when the protagonist begins to suffer from visions, suspicions and persecution.
The film features songs in the language of the indigenous tribes who lived along the river now known as Saint John, which flows between Canada and the United States. This choice of music is likely related to the meaning of the film and the history of the tribes that gradually disappeared when the Europeans arrived and spread their diseases about 400 years ago.
At the end of the film, the situation “turns over” several times, leaving the viewer in the dark about reality and deception. Perhaps the laughter of the main character at the end of the film symbolizes that the audience was fooled and could not correctly interpret all the events that they saw.
The meaning of the film
Former police detective Arthur Bretnik had unusual problems. As a result of the injury received in the accident, he began to hallucinate. Arthur tried to deal with it by taking pills, but he did it without any system. This led to serious side effects and tragic consequences.
After treatment in a psychiatric clinic, Arthur was released and decided to leave all the problems on the farm. The reason for his admission to the clinic was the tragedy that happened to his daughter. During the accident, their car collided with a truck, and the girl died, while the wife was seriously injured and was sent to a clinic for treatment, where she became paralyzed. At the clinic, Arthur met Jimmy, another patient with unusual views of the world. They both considered and believed in the existence of a conspiracy of government agencies that seek to control the minds of people, using them as puppets. Believing that the government is watching every citizen and storing information in secret bunkers, Arthur and Jimmy decide to start a radio station. Every evening, sitting under the stars,
The main events begin with the fact that a pretty girl decides to leave the city of Wonder. However, suddenly her car overturns. As she climbs out of the car and drives away before she’s even stepped a step beyond the city limits, her chest explodes with a bang. The girl dies. Soon, various specialists arrive at the scene, deciding to hide the corpse in another place.
“We warned her,” they say. However, the opinion of these specialists does not find support from the girl’s mother. She meets with Jimmy and Arthur and talks about the incident, claiming that the government killed her daughter and no one is willing to give up the corpse for burial. After paying $10,000, the mother demands that Arthur and Jimmy reveal the truth. So begins their business trip to the town of Wonder, which is located 150 kilometers from Arthur’s farm.
Arthur soon encounters the mysteries that surround this town. Although people live here, it seems almost uninhabited, because they, being quite capable of leaving, remain here. Arthur gets to the city morgue and finds several corpses with the same wounds in the chest, as if they were blown from the inside out. He also sees how some people carry the bodies of living people and shovel them into the garage. He notices the blonde running these criminals, and her face seems familiar to him.
When Arthur breaks into the garage, he finds an underground bunker full of technical equipment, and people in medical gowns are performing illegal operations by implanting chips in the bodies, right in the places where the corpses had holes from the explosion. There are a lot of people in the bunker, speaking various strange languages, sitting in glass boxes, obviously trying to get out. The investigation develops dynamically, with exciting moments of shooting, chasing, surveillance and penetration into the territory of private individuals.
Movie ending explanation
Arthur Bretnik will reveal several secrets in the finale, but it will be difficult to determine what is reality and what is fiction. Simply put, everything Arthur saw in the town of Wonder was a hallucination. Besotted with paranoid fear, he attacked and killed Jimmy, as he thought Jimmy had been planted by intelligence agents to harm Arthur and start doubts in his soul.
However, the ending will “turn” the picture several times, showing that all the characters here are participants in the conspiracy, that is, Arthur is partially right and at the same time wrong. The viewer must determine for himself what is true. In the aftermath, it will be shown that Arthur removed the chip from his chest. But where did he come from?
Before Arthur came to town, he didn’t have a chip in his chest. However, as soon as he saw a series of corpses with a hole in their chest, he immediately began to say that he was lured to this town in order to implant a chip. Paranoia is what it is! It’s scary when the mind destroys reality! The finale of the film remains open and each viewer independently tries to determine what was the result of hallucinations and what could be reality.
