The first Festival film I see following the Opening Night extravaganza turns out to be a perfect Festival kind of movie. It’s called HOOKED and watching it reminded me of the joys film festivals can offer: running across an undiscovered gem quite by accident.

Because I was interviewing TCM’s Robert Osborne at 11am on Friday, the first feature I could catch that day was the 1:30 screening (which happened to be something called HOOKED .) I went in knowing absolutely nothing about the film – not its subject matter, its country of origin, nor its length. I relished my ignorance. And the pay-off was huge.

The following is a blow-by-blow account of my experience of the first 30 minutes of the film.

[Spoiler alert]

Okay, it turns out HOOKED is a Romanian film and it starts out with the herky-jerkiest POV kind of camera work imaginable. A woman and a man in a small car are having a somewhat testy conversation. Each time one of them says something the camera abruptly cuts to the speaker; back and forth this goes, again and again and again, with occasional pans to the road ahead of them. It feels like cinema verite run amok. Can’t these Romanians work a camera? Of course they can – some of the best films of recent vintage have come out of there: 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST; FOUR MONTHS, THREE WEEKS, AND TWO DAYS, and others.

Okay, I know, maybe they’re going to hit somebody and we’ll have an up close and personal experience of the upset caused by a car wreck. But wait, this conversation is going on and on and on. It’s not going to be about a car wreck. It’s really about discovering who these two people are. We eventually figure out they’re not a married couple. She’s married but having an affair with the guy in the car. Interesting. There’s tension in the car because she is having a hard time breaking up with her husband and her lover is getting impatient and frustrated. When a whore approaches the man for sex, he declines but it sparks another testy discussion about what men see in prostitutes. Then, bam! out of the blue, their car hits and kills someone, a prostitute actually.

Okay, now the film turns into a how-to-dispose-of-the-body thriller. The woman is hyperventillating and can’t think straight. She can’t go to the police because her affair will be uncovered, so they decide to dispose of it in the woods. And just as they dump the body, an armed woodsman/guard approaches them menacingly. As he questions the suspicious-looking couple, what should break the tension but the dead woman suddenly coming back to life! The couple and the now alive woman stumble through enough excuses to get the guard to go on his merry way.

The adulterous couple continue on with their picnic plans, only now accompanied by their groggy but recovering accident victim. This hooker/victim begins to methodically and provocatively probe the soft underside of the couple’s relationship and suddenly the film turns into another kind of film altogether, this time a scenario reminiscent of Polanski’s KNIFE IN THE WATER. Where ISN’T this film going???

What starts out as a seemingly off-the-cuff, catch-as-catch-can kind of stream-of-consciousness filmmaking is eventually revealed to be as structured as classical theatre. Seemingly off-handed comments – about whores and payment, about dividing humanity into birds and fish, about loving and hating your country – come full circle by film’s end. Even the title – with its double meaning, referencing hookers AND fishermen (the guy, of course, goes fishing on his picnic) – operates on both a literal and figurative plane.

HOOKED works as a movie, no matter how much or how little you know about it going in. But I’m convinced my experience of it was enhanced by my relative ignorance of what to expect. Given how overexposed even the most general of audiences are to most of the films they end up seeing, it’s refreshing to be able to go in cold to a movie and come out completely surprised. HOOKED surprised me every step of the way. And SIFF allows for that to happen time and time again.

(By the way, HOOKED plays twice more in the Festival – June 7 and June 9.)

Watch the trailer: