Evil Is an Outsider

By RICHARD SCHIKEL

TITLE: JENNIFER 8

WRITER-DIRECTOR: BRUCE ROBINSON

THE BOTTOM LINE: Rich in atmosphere, character and solid suspense, this mystery is criminally entertaining.

WE'VE MET CHARACTERS LIKE John Berlin (Andy Garcia) before: the big-city cop who has burned out his marriage, his career and his spirit in his obsessive, | hopeless pursuit of justice. Now his brother-in-law and sometime partner Freddy (Lance Henriksen) has helped him get what is supposed to be a nice quiet job on a small-town police force in Northern California.

We've also encountered situations like this before: a brutal serial killer is out there stalking young women -- in this case, blind young women -- and baffled law-enforcement officials are in denial. No, the latest disappearance could not possibly represent his seventh depredation. No way could Helena (Uma Thurman), who, although blind, is a witness in the case, be his next target.

Like Berlin, we know better. What we're not prepared for is the way writer- director Bruce Robinson, who created the marvelously quirky Withnail & I a few years ago, develops his material. Jennifer 8 (the first victim was named Jennifer) is a classic whodunit, with clues fairly laid out (often visually) and the suspense tightening as pursuer and pursued draw closer together. It is also a persuasive portrayal of an increasingly tense cop community (John Malkovich contributes a tough, scary FBI interrogator grilling Berlin when false suspicion focuses on him). Finally, aided immeasurably by the great Conrad Hall's darkly foreboding cinematography, the film is terrific to look at. This director has a real gift for rendering gloomy provinciality in subtle imagery.

What he has no taste for at all is gore. He has no interest in maneuvering unclad women into proximity with a kitchen knife or in splattering blood across the screen in colorful patterns. He handles death the old-fashioned way -- discreetly -- and suspense, for him, is a creation of sounds and shadows.

And he treats the romance that grows between Berlin and Helena the same way. They edge toward connection tentatively, in full but unspoken awareness of the difficulties of their relationship. Nor is the suspicion of mad and more deadly passions visited upon either of them in the manner of Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct. Evil is what it is supposed to be in fictions of this kind, an outsider, and the business of the narrative is to restore order in the community that evil has disordered. In other words, Jennifer 8 is adult entertainment in the best, traditional sense of the term. R.S.