Not, to be fair, that Public Access offers us so many clues. The smart ensemble playing of Suspects is absent here, the film carried almost entirely by the unsettlingly thick-lipped and charismatic Ron Marquette. He is Whiley Pritcher, the mysterious buttoned-down stranger who one day walks into the little middle-American town of Brewster and the little middle-American lives of its buttoned-down residents.

Almost Whiley's first act is to pay up-front for four Sunday "family hour" slots on the local public access cable-TV channel, announcing that he will host a call-in show called Our Town. "What," he asks, "is wrong with Brewster?"

The answers are slow in coming, but eventually the seething underbelly of the town is exposed in all its petty squabbles and bigotry, and the question becomes not what but who is wrong with Brewster.

Public Access is a terribly measured affair. The film is in no apparent hurry, and proves it in a series of very effective long, languorous zooms and tracks across the studio as Whiley broadcasts, telling us one thing and showing another. The film looks and sounds superb.

Marquette is perfect for the piece, whether he's in his sensible Republican suit or naked, scrubbing out the bathtub. What he is, we discover, is a sociopath, and that in turn is where the film eventually fails. Once the killing starts it cannot sustain the stifling atmosphere of before, and ends up shooting for one too many targets - the serial killing, the media manipulation, the politics - losing impetus somewhere along the way. The end should be scary but is merely necessary.

Public Access has too much of an agenda to generate as flesh crawling, disorienting an ambience as that masterpiece of small-town paranoia Blue Velvet, but the debt owed to Lynch is huge in its shades of both Lumbertown and Twin Peaks. It's an ambitious and impressive debut whose ultimate disappointment, one senses, has more to do with a failure of technique than nerve.