FBI agent Ileana Scott (Angelina Jolie) is called to Montreal by High LeClair (Tcheky Karyo) who is heading up an investigation of what may be the work of a serial killer. In her first probe into the case, she lies down where one victim was unearthed at a construction site. This unusual exercise enables Illeana to conclude that the killer is a meticulous person who wanted the body to be discovered. This outsider's involvement in the case angers Paquette (Oliver Martinez) and his partner Duval (Jean-Hughes Anglade).
Illeana is the kind of person who eats with pictures of the victim tacked on the ceiling of her room. To say that she is relentless in her work is putting it mildly. She seems to have no private life and is not interested in anything beyond the case in front of her. Her obsession with the serial killer matches his fondness for detail and gamesmanship. The question at the heart of their competition is: Who will spin the web that imprisons the other?
D. J. Caruso directs this engrossing thriller based on a novel by Michael Pyle. Jon Bokenkamp has fashioned a terse screenplay that stays on course with the essentials and doesn't fly all over the place. As her investigation intensifies, Illeana realizes that the killer is a deeply disturbed man who assumes the identity of his victims after they have been dispatched. Among the individuals who are caught up in her web are James Costa (Ethan Hawke), an art dealer who claims to have seen the serial killer murdering another man; Mrs. Asher (Gina Rowlands), a distraught mother who thinks she's recognized her deranged son who disappeared 19 years ago; and Hart (Kiefer Sutherland), a mysterious man who has been trying to make contact with Costa.
Angelina Jolie puts in a fine performance as Illeana, a woman who caves in to her repressed emotions for one evening and pays a high price for breaking her unswerving FBI discipline. Although her character does not in any way equal the complexity of Jodie Foster's in The Silence of the Lambs, here is another woman warrior who finds herself lost in the darkness during her dangerous pursuit of a malevolent and tricky serial killer.
