I Think We're Alone Now review (DVD) ★★★

I Think We're Alone Now is certainly a unique documentary. How it even came to be is quite bizarre. Like most documentaries, the film follows people as their lives unfold and gives us insight into their personalities, only, in I Think We're Alone Now, there is no complexity in its telling of reality—the formula is simple: take 52-year-old Asperger's sufferer Jeff Turner and inter-sexed Kelly McCormick, and then add 1980s pop sensation Tiffany to that picture. The result is this quirky and at times scary expose. Forget Robert Pattinson and his legions of screaming, hormonal girl-fans, this is the ultimate depiction of celebrity obsession.

Jeff and Kelly have an obsession with Tiffany that is a few hundred steps further than unhealthy. It's not borderline insane, it is insane, and this insanity is split totally unevenly between the two, who didn't know of each other until during filming. Kelly is a super-fan who has dreamed of a love life with Tiffany ever since the late '80s when she was struck down in a bicycle accident. She insists that while in a coma she had a vision of her in a bed with Tiffany, but that she had no idea who she was, and it wasn't until she saw someone with her record that she realised. I'm not making this up.

With Jeff, his Asperger's syndrome means that he's extremely smart, but at the same time tragically deluded. His head is filled with information to the extent where conversation becomes futile, as he spouts useless details about all sorts of things, and usually off-topic. He is what the press and the majority of people who watch this documentary will call a stalker—he is the most highly-publicised fan of Tiffany's, having been arrested on a number of occasion, even ending up in court on the opposing side to his idol. One of Jeff's arrests came from him waiting for the singer whilst brandishing a samurai sword and a bunch of flowers to present to her. Apparently that is one of Japan's highest honours that you can give to someone, but the police certainly didn't know that. That is a prime example of Jeff's aforementioned knowledge. He professes his loving relationship with Tiffany, but all the while you can see that she really just thinks he is totally delusional. Such an opinion could be reinforced by the fact that Turner firmly believes Tiffany to be the structure of which the universe is held together.

While it's easy to poke fun and laugh at the portrayal of Jeff and Kelly as extreme social oddities—they are indeed undeniable outcasts—but they are both mentally disabled and the film seems more focused on exposing them quite literally as freaks, rather than human beings with disorders that give them their strange behaviour. The documentary also does very little to show us what's in their lives apart from Tiffany, although the writer-director decided to cap off the film with Jeff announcing that another obsession of his is Alyssa Milano, and that she purposely time travelled to alter the future to ensure that they never fell in love.

I Think We're Alone Now is a dark film with frightening, even disturbing moments, mainly involving Jeff Turner. He has such a collection of Tiffany-related newspaper cuttings that he could be a deranged serial killer in a horror movie, but instead he's an aging man with a handicap and a tragic affinity for a woman who will never share his feelings.

EXTRAS None.