Isaac Knott (Nick Stahl) is a Public Radio reporter in New York City. When he was eight, his mother and father died in an automobile accident that left him in a wheelchair. On air, Isaac recounts how he recently received an anonymous tip from someone identified only as “Ancient Chinese Girl.” She tells him a perfectly able-bodied man walked into an emergency ward downtown, and attempted to bribe a doctor into amputating his leg. As Isaac investigates the eerie tip, he encounters Fiona (Vera Farmiga) who, through her own quandary, leads Isaac to a netherworld of people afflicted with a perverse desire to be disabled. Like a contemporary noir detective film, QUID PRO QUO follows Issac as he embarks on a dream-like journey to pull back the layers of what makes people feel whole.
Tag-Archive for » Nick Stahl «
Public Radio investigative reporter Isaac Knott just happens to be confined to a wheel chair. In the course of doing a story about disability wanna-be’s, Isaac traverses a surreal world of fetishism and transgressive eroticism that recalls the unique perspectives of Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock. In the course of Isaac’s investigation, he finds Fiona–or she finds him–and she offers him a window into a dark place that exists somewhere between reality and dreams. Her life’s aspiration is to be crippled, or at least perceived as such. She’s beautiful and successful, yet she longs to be physically destroyed to regain some spiritual transcendence in her life. Her complexity, along with her erotic compulsions, prove irresistible to Isaac. Isaac is drawn to Fiona’s dark side because somewhere in the strata of her perversion lies an underlying truth about himself. He is confined to a wheelchair because of an accident. What can he possibly learn about himself from Fiona’s desire to be like him? The answer of course is everything.
A moving drama about the deep familial bond that develops between a 30-year-old man and his young niece after the girl’s mother suddenly leaves town. Forced out of her home after her boyfriend is arrested, Joleen Reedy needs a place to stay with her 11-year-old daughter, Tara. She turns for help to her younger brother, James–a simple and overly trusting man who doesn’t hesitate to welcome them into his modest rental apartment. Almost as soon as she moves in, however, Joleen hits the road with another man. Utterly ill-equipped to be the sole guardian of an adolescent girl, James does his best to make his distraught niece happy. But before long, things spin out of control: he loses his road crew job and Tara is put into foster care. Additionally, old wounds from his emotionally abusive and sometimes violent father begin to reopen as James is forced to re-examine his life. That’s when James makes a fateful decision that will bring his life full circle and force him to face his demons. He takes off with Tara and the pair assumes new identities as father and daughter. What starts out as a ploy to evade authorities takes on a deeper significance as James strives to become the dad Tara never had, and for the first time finds a true purpose in life.
Recent Comments