DAMAGED INTENTIONS

A trio of hypervigilant yet clueless conspiracy theorists accidentally find themselves at the center of a hostage situation in a New York school.

While you sleep, the Watchers tirelessly monitor online communications to reveal the shameful secrets kept by agents of the Circle, whose ranks evidently include politicians, the police, and countless other authority figures. On the basis of an overreading of a routine political announcement that would be ludicrous if it weren’t so plausible and unnerving, three Watchers code-named Red Queen, Caterpillar, and Hatter convince themselves that Christopher Columbus High School is running a “child-sex-slave-ring” and, meeting for the first time in person, show up at the school demanding to see the security recordings that would presumably show Circle slavers bundling innocent teens into anonymous vehicles and spiriting them away. When they meet with understandable resistance, the conflict rapidly escalates, and the three Watchers end up taking the school principal, his secretary, a chemistry teacher, and two students hostage as the school is surrounded by New York’s finest. Apart from the absurdity of the premise, this would all be routine if the NYPD’s hostage negotiator weren’t Lt. Abby Mullen and one of the hostages weren’t her daughter, Samantha, who’s just learned in A Deadly Influence (2021) that Abby herself was one of the few survivors of the Wilcox Cult Massacre more than 30 years ago. Once the unsettling premise has been set up, the skillfully extended standoff becomes altogether less original, though the wily, resourceful Omer keeps it all suspenseful and tosses in a few welcome surprises.

A breathless exploration of the paranoid mindset.