Low budget Canadian psychological thriller about an actor swallowed by the method. It’s about the quality of a TV movie or less (I noticed boom mikes in two different scenes) brought to you by the writer of ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE.
Not flashy but decent character study with an underplayed performance by Tom McCamus as disturbed actor Henry Adler. Opens with a cop getting shot and our hero stumbling upon the aftermath. Adler works at a bank while waiting for acting gigs to come his way. He finally gets a recurring guest role on a popular cop show and starts to become the character. He asks if he can take the costume home to get into the role (bad prop master, bad!), wears it out and about and gets into trouble.
Brigitte Bako, kind of a thicker Jennifer Connelly, plays the actress who plays the hooker his cop character tries to help. Initially attracted to him, his weird obsessive behavior soon has her wanting nothing to do with him. He’s more attracted to her character than her.
A perhaps unnecessary scene where the bank he works at gets robbed shows a guard getting shot and Adler forced to help a blonde robber dressed like Marilyn Monroe in THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH. Suspicion he was involved in the robbery combined with his father’s death and Charlie cutting off their friendship makes him lose his tenuous grasp on reality.
He wanders the streets in his uniform and falls in with a real psycho cop Frank, deliciously played by Kevin Tighe (TV’s EMERGENCY!) who accepts him as one of the brotherhood in blue. He has some dirty work to do and takes him to a drug dealer’s apartment. After asking if he should read the guy his rights, he is told, “You watch too much TV, kid.” I guess Canada has no Miranda rights. 
Frank manipulates Adler into killing the dealer, and he runs home horrified. Going stalker on Charlie, he busts in to tell her “I don’t love you for what you are. I love you for what I think you can become.” Oh yeah, and by the way, I killed a man.
The realistically grim ending nicely surprised me. He does seem to descend into a creepy stalker wing nut awfully quickly, but his performance is quietly effective. Overall, it’s not bad for a low-budget thriller. Economic necessity may have forced the filmmakers into pushing the story in unique directions; questions arise regarding the line between role-playing and normal behaviour, how much of an actor is in his character and how it is possible for lose yourself in fantasy until it seems more real than our shared consensus reality. McCamus and Tighe both won Genie Awards for their roles. The bad Jan Hammer-esque synth music by Ron Sures falls flat, while the tunes from The Tragically Hip fare better. DVD is a typical cheap-ass Simitar full frame direct from video burn.
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