An unfamiliar brother from another planet would be bemused, for at first glance Look seems like a part-and-parcel participant in the spectator-only virtual screen-reality we have become. But though it resembles the voyeuristic national peep show, and though it is about the “approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States capturing covert images of average Americans as much as 200 times a day,” this film also, perhaps inadvertently, concerns the arbitrary parceling out of just deserts.

Writer-director Adam Rifkin took his working title “Surveillance” idea from a moving violation ticket that arrived along with proof-positive police photos. Relieved he had been doing nothing more personally embarrassing behind the wheel than singing, he imagined other, more damaging possibilities, like the married man irrefutably caught with his secret lover.

From there, he actively took notice of the intrusive, only sometimes hidden cameras in daily life, and thence to the concept of shooting a whole film as though through the lenses of these mechanical snoopers, complete with their corner date-time-place digital notations. Positioning lenses where true recording devices would be, filming in wide angle and, unheard-of today, without even medium close-ups of actors with unknown faces, he conveys a documentary sense of what so many are conditioned to view as “reality.”

That said perceived reality depends on re-creations, and that it is out of “Cops” or “Police Chase,” does not diminish its acceptance by armchair America. Libertarians will read in Patriot Act Big Brotherism, an erosion of privacy in the name of paranoid security, as when a man of Middle Eastern features (Tasfay) forgets a backpack beneath a bus seat. Law-and-Order folks, on the other hand, will applaud the surveillance- and TV news-aided capture of a pair of cold cop-killers (Sebastian Feldman and Rhys Coiro).

The characters in a half-dozen episodes that interweave and draw apart, are further kept at a distance from us by the reminder of film-as-film, in this case tagged videos of dubious color lapsing to momentary lines or black-and-white or staticky snow. Except for an unfairly misleading, and misconceived, gay bump-and-grind birthday “cop” (Christian Letelier), the others all fit. That the mosaic pieces are somehow linked à la Altman is not unpalatable, for coincidences do occur in life as in cinema.

The ensuing mixture is not unrepresentative of California, or of much of the country. The film has the courage to make its African-American a civil-rights lawyer who is homosexual, in search of commitment (Chris Williams, as George Higgins), whereas married-with-children white lawyer Ben (Paul Schackman) left pro bono for lucrative practice but has a secret side. Then there are miniskirted high schoolers Sherri Van Hafton and Holly (Spencer Redford and Heather Hogan), spoiled sexually active predators contesting their hots for faithfully married teacher Berry Krebbs (Jamie McShane).

The butt of Stuart’s (Tom Hodges) cruel office jokes and rebuffed by female staff, nerdy Marty (Ben Weber) has offensive B.O. and another, truly dark secret side. Floor manager Tony Gilbert (Hayes MacArthur) sweet-talks his way into storeroom trysts with female personnel; and teen William M. Gaines (Giuseppe Andrews) has girl issues, too, but dreams of music success with compositions like “Electrocuted” while clerking a Shell station minimart.

They are all captured by impersonal camera eyes. It is the human beholder who must assemble and assess what is recorded. He may become distressingly involved, as in Coppola’s The Conversation, or choose to use the privileged God-observer position for stone-cold revenge, exemplified in Andrea Arnold’s Red Road début. These two films zero in on the beholder, the thinking snoop, while part of the viewer agreement of Look is that there’s no individual looking on as such, when even police officers in the act of watching monitor banks for leads are themselves captured by yet other cameras.

Acrimony grows on both sides of the individual rights vs. homeland security divide, famously envisioned in 1984 (written in ’49). But few are aware that sixteen years before Orwell, fellow British Isles writer George Bernard Shaw had visited and decried America’s lack of privacy. Starting out like goofy comedy tinged with a police show, Look soon shows its capable colors. Implications are there to be read, frightening or reassuring. Not as easily picked up on, possibly not even intended by the filmmaker, is the unequivocally dark undercurrent: justice is not blind, it just doesn’t care; glad or sad, rewarded or ruined, all is a crapshoot. 

(Released by Captured Films and rated "R" for strong sexual content, pervasive language, some violence and brief drug use.)