Deceiver

REVIEW
A twisty bit of trickery, Deceiver is gripping without ever being really good. Slickly written and directed by twins Joshua and Jonas Pate, this psychological mystery concerns two cops, Braxton (Penn) and Kennesaw (Rooker), who are administering a polygraph test to murder suspect James Walter Wayland (Roth). James suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy, and he may have killed, halved, and discarded a prostitute (Zellweger, seen only in flashback) during one of his seizures. However, while the cops do not have any hard evidence, James has some dirt on them. As the tables turn on all of the characters, and nasty secrets are revealed, it almost never becomes clear just who is deceiving whom. This overly artly film has only some bravura acting by Roth and Rooker to recommend it.