It’s hard to provide a plot summary of Reptile that does it justice or that feels commensurate to the extraordinary sense of emergence, complexity and ambivalence that hangs around debut director Grant Singer’s mise-en-scenes. On paper, it’s a crime drama, revolving around Tom Nichols (Benicio del Toro), a detective working out of the fictional town of Scarborough,  who becomes the primary investigator on a particularly baffling murder – that of realtor Summer Elswick (Matilda Lutz), girlfriend of property mogul Will Grady (Justin Timberlake), himself the son of property baroness Camille Grady (Frances Fisher). Summer is found stabbed to death after what appears to be a house inspection but the case quickly balloons as Tom finds himself caught between a number of different perspectives – those of his wife Judy (Alicia Silverstone), his partner Dan Cleary (Ato Essandoh), his colleague Wally (Domenick Lombardozzi) and his boss (and Judy’s uncle) Robert Allen (Eric Bogosian). Along the way, various suspects emerge, including Summer’s best friend Renee (Sky Ferreira) and her ex-husband Sam Gifford (Karl Glusman), along with Eli Phillips (Michael Carmen Pitt), an ex-client of the Gradys who was cheated out of his family home, causing his father to take his own life.

This sprawling network hinges on Tom’s recognition of a connection between drug dealing and the property market in the town – a pipeline between narcotics and real estate that is as clear in its general coordinates as its particulars remain oblique and opaque for most of the film. That’s not to say these particulars don’t make themselves felt, but that it doesn’t occur at a linear narrative level so much as a Gothic sense of property, a fracturing of domestic space. No house in the film feels conventionally lived-in, producing a pervasive and ambient unhomeliness and uncanniness. We shift from the pregnant vacancy of houses prepared for inspection, to Tom’s recurring dream of not being able to pull the trigger during a home invasion, to Tom’s own house, which is in the midst of being renovated. We first see it, draped in sheets, just after the renovators have made a mistake in the kitchen ceiling, creating an even more precarious and provisional sense of domestic space, especially once Tom announces his plan to buy the same kitchen sink he saw at the crime scene. Much of the investigation also involves Tom standing outside various properties in the Grady empire – circling, scrutinising and attempting to establishing dialogue with them, in the same way that Will Graham gazes upon the homes of the Tooth Fairy’s victims in Manhunter and Red Dragon.

This unhomeliness unsettles the entire film, starting with Grant’s awry compositions, which start with askew relationships between people and domestic spaces, and then generalise into a liminality that works its way into every scene and moment. At one point we gaze upon Sam’s mid-torso through the slat in the front of his house; at another point Tom opens a bathroom mirror to abruptly bring Will and Dan into the shot; later on Tom realises that if Summer’s hands are placed together at a particularly obtuse angle a set of dental prints can be discerned. Moments like these make you realise how much the domestic sphere, and the bourgeois home, is used as a way of defining, centring and constraining character in American cinema, whether directors are identifying with it or openly rejecting it. Grant eschews both of these options to remain at its margins, producing tableaux that take place in and around homes but are palpably not of them, or at least not legibly of them. At a few key points in the narrative, Tom stumbles across domestic scenes that are just a little too forced, a little too staged, in what their meaning is supposed to be, even as their actual physical and spatial coordinates remain unclear. After Dan supposedly shoots Will in his house with Tom’s gun, Tom comes across Will bleeding at an odd angle in a chicken coop, without having witnessed the actual event itself; in another scene Tom comes home to find Judy pointing a gun at Eli, a hole in their swimming pool, in a mise-en-scene that feels transparent and opaque at once.

Since the film is so liminal, it quickly comes to resonate most at the jagged overlaps and oblique synergies between scenes. These blink-and-you’ll-miss-it junctures and correspondances are so subliminal that they almost operate unconsciously, for both Tom and the audience, modulating the temperature of the film from benign to menacing in an instant, or else preventing each new shot from settling comfortably into either feeling. Early on, while Summer is still alive, she finds a snake skin on the patio of an open house – the reptile of the title – and the film operates in a similar way, shedding its skin and involuting itself until it consists entirely of its own connective tissue, of the syntax that would normally be taken for granted in a conventional crime film. Even within scenes, these junctures remain, but as a function of mise-en-scene rather than cuts, internal montage rather than montage, as Tom’s energy is drawn towards one fringe discussion after another, choruses on the edge of his consciousness, sometimes populated by people he knows and sometimes populated by strangers, who seem to have networked an insight into the case he can’t quite glean. These networked peripheries work particularly brilliantly in the case of Judy, since they resonate so evocatively with the screen persona of Silverstone herself, who has been on the fringes of cinematic consciousness of late but in ways that make her smile even more wonderfully awry.

All of that combines to produce a hushed sense of emergence – an ambient prescience of some networked state that can only be glimpsed at the outermost nodes of the narrative, in the connective tissue between the ostensible points of focus. It’s not unlike the hush of the 90s erotic crime thriller, which also presented crimes scenes as mise-en-scenes of arcane information convergence. While Tom is a seasoned detective he has never seen a crime scene quite like this one – never encountered a victim stabbed so brutally that the knife became lodged in her pelvic bone, and never encountered traces of calcimine, a paint brand that has been off the market for decades. No source of information is ever quite sequestered or safe, which means that most characters possess or exude an inexplicable informational access, such as when Eli knows it’s Tom’s birthday before the audience, and despite having only ever seen him a handful of times. It makes sense that Lombardozzi is among the cast, since Singer is ultimately aiming for the same density and complexity as The Wire, albeit condensing it into a two-hour crime film so as to crystallise it to his signature sense of emergence, his ability to craft a text that consists entirely of edges, interfaces and points of resonance. In the ether around and amidst Reptile, a new world order looms, driven by the illicit highs of a new property market, a new sense of space, but a little too close and ambient to be fully visible.