Review: The Arrangement

Director: Jake Hunsicker

Screenplay: Andrew Hunsicker and Jake Hunsicker

Year: 2020

“The Arrangement” is a crime thriller made by the father and son duo of Andrew and Jake Hunsicker. Although limited by a low budget and little experience, the end product doesn't necessarily reflect these issues. On the contrary, “The Arrangement” offers an entertaining plot full of suspense, twists, and turns. 

The opening scene of “The Arrangement” has as a centerpiece a man, interpreted by Eric Roberts (“The Evil Inside Her”), pitching a speech to the public. Half motivational speech and half get-rich-quick scheme, we know that this speech is not random and will have some repercussions on the plot. Actually, if you pay close attention to the man's words, several clues fall out about the movie’s outcome, which, to be honest, is not easy to predict.

The next scene gets into what would be the plot of the movie. In this scene, a successful investor is in the midst of a difficult situation as she sees how one of her investment is dropping like a brick. Consequently, the investor jumps off a window of her office, reminiscent of what happened during the 2008 financial crisis in the United States, and this starts a police investigation. The investor dies with a picture in her hands, leading detectives Álvarez (Jennifer M. Kay) and Frick (Danny Donnelly) to suspect that the death was not a suicide but a homicide.

From here, a story of crime and police investigations unfolds that has a little bit of everything: corruption, fraud, abuse of authority, and even a supernatural aspect. However, this is one of its pitfalls, as in trying to be so ambitious with the vast array of topics it wants to tackle, the plot becomes unnecessarily complicated and hard to follow in some parts. This also gives way to the movie being longer than it needs to be and would have benefited from some more editing to get a more concise product. 

As the movie progresses and more bodies are added into the investigation, all of them interrelated, an interesting quandary is created where you don’t know who is involved with the deaths and who isn’t. To achieve this, a great effort is put in placing several twists and shots to make the viewer suspect all the characters. I have to say that they do a great job of keeping the final twist out of the realm of possibilities until it is surprisingly and effectively revealed.

“The Arrangement” is a low-budget movie that combines the suspense from crime and police movies with a supernatural twist. The script suffers from becoming too complicated, but it gets compensated for with the unexpected twists. The impressive ending is the epitome of how twists are made the most of to keep the audience unaware and then surprise it with the final twists.