Starring Lindsay Lohan

Back before he was forced into making crowdfunded soft-core porn starring a tabloid wreck, Paul Schrader had a career in the movies. A pretty interesting one, too! If he wasn’t the most consistent filmmaker, directorial efforts like Auto Focus brought some depth to the ultratormented male behaviour Schrader was often trying to depict.

The Canyons is breathtakingly vapid in comparison. There’s nothing—and I mean nothing—that is real, true, or insightful in this movie. If Schrader had any feel for camp, then perhaps his tale of kink-seeking Hollywood trash could have been turned into something like Valley of the Dolls by way of Caligula. Instead, with its pathetically earnest and astoundingly lousy dialogue—courtesy of rapidly deteriorating novelist Bret Easton Ellis—we get The Room with none of the laughs.

As it is, the only appeal here is the morbid spectacle of a scarily over-Botoxed Lindsay Lohan in a psychosexual showdown with porn star James Deen. He’s a decadent, sex-addicted, sociopathic rich kid, and she’s the abused partner. Much nudity and a notorious, climactic four-way ensue. The film’s other characters aren’t worth describing.

None of the performances work, but it’s hard to imagine how they could. Lohan evinces a single convincing moment when Deen’s character gives her a smack, but if you caught the widely read New York Times magazine article about this film, you’ll know that she talked about channelling her relationship with Daddy for that scene. So, yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

Equally painful, in its own way, is a montage of abandoned cinemas that inexplicably plays behind the title and end credits. Bottoming out with digital-age, sensationalist junk like this, how could it be anything besides a sad expression of Schrader’s own torments?

Published August, 2013