Metacritic reviews

The writing is relaxed in the right places and heightened to a largely effective degree when it counts.

Both characters are riveting, and they even manage to earn most of the freight that Donovan loads onto his heavily ironic title.

On one level, it's a dark, funny tragedy, but it's also Donovan's thesis on his own craft.

Donovan, acting with ironic reserve, hands the movie to Morse, who makes his character the kind of crank you can care about just because he's so abysmally lost.

Morse and Donovan hold us rapt in this clearly told tale about identity confusion.

Both Robert and Gus seem defined purely by their eccentric speech patterns, and it takes a while for the duo to register as anything other than acting-exercise conceits. But once the story takes a defiantly odd turn into thriller territory (really an excuse to hole up two talented thespians in a single location), the affected nature of the performances becomes a virtue.

Hartley fans will certainly see his influence, especially in dialogue and movement that are so precise as to feel choreographed.

Collaborator has the tone and structure of an extended one-act play. Its uniformly wooden dialogue lends it the stage-bound feel of a tortured writing exercise.

The banter is playful and brazenly self-aware, but the ideas are a bit stale and don't lead anywhere emotionally substantial or narratively spontaneous.