Matthew Kerkhoff's film Seeing Thru gets off to a good start, and manages to end up as a pretty solid effort, especially considering that this is a student film and his first feature. Matthew does a nice job of acting (as Tom, the male lead) as well as directing and producing. Unfortunately the script, which he also wrote, while winning in places, ends up being the weaker link, along with the usual minor technical glitches common to low-budget films: color balance (especially bleeding reds) and occasional issues with image quality, framing and lighting. The technical issues - except for the bleeding reds - were minor for a film of this type and overall they were handled well.

The story revolves around Tom, who is apparently a late bloomer and has reached the age where he is ready to try and jumpstart his love life. In the process, he comes into possession of a unique pair of what appear to be sunglasses, except that these "sunglasses" allow him to see in the dark. When it's not dark, they allow him to see everyone naked. While this isn't the most original premise, Kerkhoff does a good job with it for the most part and there are some funny scenes. The quality of the acting, overall, is a good bit better than might be expected from a low-budget student film.

This movie had a lot of potential to be quite good. It seemed a little longer than its 63-minute runtime, and would have benefited from tighter editing, or cutting some scenes while expanding others. The scene of Tom's mom thrusting her hand in and out of a glass at the kitchen sink comes to mind as one that probably should have wound up on the cutting room floor - if only because its been done too many times already - and the Crapper character wasn't a particularly effective way to handle the situations and transitions that he appeared in. I'm not faulting Armand Sindoni's acting (okay, it wasn't that great), but that part of the story wasn't well scripted and seemed out of sync with the rest.

Another problem was the running gag all thru the film about "little girls". While questionable at any point, I was laughing along with the joke in the early scenes when Tom is getting ready for his first "blind" date, but this whole concept became stale, crude and unfunny before the end of the film.

Bottom line: I enjoyed the first part of this movie and it had its moments throughout. I liked it better than the vast majority of the network sitcoms I've seen in the past few years. Yes, that's a backhanded compliment, considering the sorry state of network sitcoms, but Matthew Kerkhoff wasn't working with a network budget and resources, either. I think he has a lot of potential. Let's see what he does with it.

click here to visit the Seeing Thru website

click here to see the trailer

Seeing Thru (2001, a Matthew Kerkhoff film) (out of 4)
written, directed and produced by Matthew Kerkhoff
director of photography: Robert Freeman
Assistant Director: Xiang Li
Matthew Kerkhoff as Tom
Shannon Dunne Farias as Drew
Kate Revelle as Mom
Shaun Johnson as Jay
Larry Woodland as Roscoe
Armand Sindoni as Crapper
Raymond J. Harris as the teacher
Natalia Vainshtein as Rachel
Jimmy Albert as neighbor

return to wholmmovies main page