I like Abel Ferrara. This is a pedestrian way to start a review, but given how much the Bronx-born director divides opinion, it is germane to what follows. One of cinema’s true risk-taking seers, his films number the blood-soaked Driller Killer (1977), Bad Lieutenant (1992) in which Harvey Keitel stars, and Ms 45 (1981) in which Zoë Lund shoots down rapists dressed as a nun.
Ferrara’s latest offering, Zeros and Ones, is no less controversial or incomprehensible. Ethan Hawke plays an American special-forces soldier operating as a cog in an anti-terrorist unit based in Rome (Ferrara’s adopted lockdown city). In what is intended to be a visual mise en abyme, Hawke also plays his revolutionary twin brother, a left-wing revolutionary held captive in an unidentified location.
