Trust

This tamely erotic thriller about a beautiful married couple beset by temptation plays like a daytime soap opera with all the distracting tumbles of its plot.

“Trust” feels like a sexed-up daytime soap opera. Scratch that, I actually watched a little modern-day soap operas not too long ago and was surprised by how much skin they showed and how torrid the romance was. This movie about a New York married couple fighting temptation is positively tame by comparison.

This is the sort of erotic movie in which people spend a whole lot of time talking about sex and very little actually doing it. And when they do do it, it’s that dark room with very soft focus sort of thing. I’m not saying every movie has to be a flesh-fest, but by golly if you’re going to make like a naughty flick, it needs to be at least a little bit naughty.

Victoria Justice stars as Brooke, a woman who quiet her job at Sotheby’s to start her own art gallery. She’s married to Owen (Matthew Daddario), a soft news reporter on one of the NYC television station. They’re an extraordinarily beautiful brunette couple, and have been together since high school. Now they’re trying to have a baby while juggling busy careers and carrying lots of stress.

Owen tries to surprise her with tickets to spend Christmas in Paris, but Brooke is on the verge of a big deal involving a new artist she’s backing. Ansgar (Lucien Laviscount) is an Irish street artist whose paintings consist entirely of nudes of women he’s slept with. Ansgar is very good-looking and fit, wears approximately six pounds of various jewelry at any given time, and seems to have that Napoleon complex a lot of short guys do.

You can probably figure where this goes: Ansgar immediately looks to add Brooke to his collection, Owen becomes jealous and resentful, this turns into a genuine rift with Brooke, and both are now tempted to carry through with affairs they hadn’t even contemplated before. Things really get kicked into the bitter zone when Brooke decides on a last-minute business trip with Ansgar to, you guessed it, Paris to meet with a famous rich dealer who wants to buy some of his paintings.

The part you may not see coming is Amy (Katherine McNamara), a beautiful blonde journalism student at Columbia who bumps into Owen at a bar while Brooke is away on her trip and puts all sorts of moves on him, playing the silly fangirl at first, then asking for journalism advice, before moving straight into ‘let’s go back to your place.’

Turns out she’s actually a professional hired by Brooke to tempt Owen to see if he’ll stray. Later on, Amy and Ansgar will meet and form their own sparks, so we’ve got a love quadrangle going on for a bit.

The movie is based on a play by Kristen Lazarian, who co-wrote the screenplay with K.S. Bruce and Brian DeCubellis, with DeCubellis also directing. It’s a technically well-made film, with decent production values, nice mood lighting, costumes, sets, etc.

It looks slick but plays clumsily. There are so many talkie scenes involving yammering to each other on the phone, or texting, or on a tablet, etc. Brooke does most of the snooping, and eventually makes a discovery that’s shocking to her, and maybe to us as well.

“Trust” spends a lot of time toying with the audience, misdirecting us here or there. Much of the intrigue is about whether Brooke and Owen have actually cheated on each other. Given everything that goes down it seems a given, but maybe not. The movie will flash-forward or back in time, replay scenes we’ve already seen to put a new spin on them given a piece of information we just received.

Truth is, most of this is just plain boring. The film is at its best when the actors are just given a chance to play off each other, show their hurt and pain, get angry or find tender feelings they’d thought lost. All the dippity-do tumbles of the plot are a distraction.

Just as the characters don’t de-clothe as much as you’d expect in an erotic thriller, the film is even more coy about what’s going on under their skin.