Crumb Catcher

Promising more than it is able to deliver, it’s a case of a genre indie that stops short of becoming a kitschy B Grade classic.

If you can withstand spending nearly two hours in the company of these grating, argumentative characters, there are rewards to be had in a skillfully wrought, twisty suspense tale.

The title of “Crumb Catcher” is all too apt. Skotchdopole sprinkles bits and pieces that add up to very little.

An aspirationally farcical home invasion thriller that never fully thrills, despite a game cast that does its darnedest to liven up an unfocused script that’s fashioned from genre odds and ends.

With a distinct POV, strong visual design, and the ability to see his strange slow-burn vision of semi-realistic domestic torture all the way through, Skotchdopole serves up a strong enough debut that he should someday get a shot at making another.

Chris Skotchdopole’s feature debut is a tantalizing mix of the absurd and the mundane.

Chris Skotchdopole’s feature debut extorts its cringily funny/tense scenes from a marriage (or two) with messy mania

Equally, flashes of sharp and taut direction are followed by long moments of nothing very much, leading to a rollercoaster ride where every jump can be seen coming, and every stomach lurch is followed by enough recovery time to forget all about it.

A rambling and muddled attempt to approximate the result had Funny Games director Michael Haneke helmed a remake of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

[A] deceptively smart, occasionally muddled debut feature.