Clean, Shaven is a 1993 film directed by Lodge Kerrigan.
Peter (Peter Greene, who played Zed the rapist in Pulp Fiction) is a schizophrenic. He has an array of very serious symptoms that include auditory hallucinations (sometimes voices, more often dissonant background buzzing and static), visual hallucinations (maybe), extreme paranoia, and a tendency to self-harm. Despite being in desperate need of care and close supervision Peter is roaming about free. He drives around in a car where he has replaced the windows with newspaper, looking for his eight-year-old daughter Nicole, who was put up for adoption by his mother while Peter was institutionalized.
Meanwhile, a detective, Jack McNally, is investigating a serial killer of young girls. Peter becomes a prime suspect when Jack discovers that Peter was staying at the motel where a victim's body was found, but no actual evidence links him to the crime. Still, as Peter hunts for his daughter, Jack hunts for Peter.
Tropes:
- Beach Bury: A heartwarming moment in which Nicole laughs after her father buries her in sand on the beach. This is immediately subverted in the next scene where, after Peter has dug her out, he earnestly tells her about the radio receiver and transmitter that the people at the crazy house implanted in his scalp and finger.
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: One of the first shots is a close-up of tall grass in a field. This is less about the power of nature than about Peter's tendency to focus in on minor details in his environment.
- Call-Back: The static on the radio that Jack listens to as he drives around is the same as the static buzzing that Peter hears in his head. And the extreme close-ups as Jack uses tweezers to retrieve a cigarette butt and minute flecks of blood from Peter's room mirror earlier closeups that show the minor things that Peter focuses on and obsesses about.
- Downer Ending: Peter dies. His mother is left sobbing, doubtless thinking about the son she failed. After none of the DNA and evidence in Peter's room is matched to the victim, Jack is left nursing a drink and thinking about how he killed a man who might have been innocent. And the last scene is little Nicole on her adoptive mother's fishing boat, using the radio to try and call out to the receiver in her father's head.
- Face on a Milk Carton: Peter stares fixedly at a picture of a missing young girl on a milk carton. Like much of the rest of the film, this is ambiguous as to whether Peter killed her (or has similar murderous urges), or whether he's thinking about his own daughter that he's trying to find.
- Fingore: A very gross scene in which Peter, in the depths of his mania, slices off one of his fingernails with a knife. Complete with an extreme closeup of the knife blade digging away under the fingernail.
- Gorn: A scene where Jack attends an autopsy of the dead, mutilated remains of a young girl.
- Gross-Up Close-Up: Some truly disgusting closeups of the harm Peter does to himself, like when he digs a hole in the top of his head, or an even worse close-up of when he uses a pen knife to dig out and slice off his own fingernail.
- Hearing Voices: Peter hears a near-constant buzz of static, sometimes backed by whispering or mumbling. Other, more intelligible voices might be hallucinations or might be memories.
- Rage Against the Reflection: A low-key example. Peter cannot deal with seeing himself in a mirror. So he tapes up any reflective surface, like the rear-view mirror or side mirrors in his car, or the bathroom mirrors in the hotel rooms where he stays.
- The Schizophrenia Conspiracy: Peter believes the people at the mental institution put a transmitter in his fingernail and a receiver in his scalp. This is what he blames for the voices he hears. So he digs a hole in his head and slices his fingernail off.
- Self-Harm: Peter's mania and schizophrenia causes him to dig a hole in his head and slice off his fingernail.
- Serial Killer: Peter might or might not be one, but there's definitely one out there, preying on young girls. Jack, desperate to catch the killer, focuses on Peter as his only suspect.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: Peter, dealing with a case of severe schizophrenia. It's not clear what is real and what is hallucination. Repeatedly we hear the ranting of a man—it could be Peter's memory of an abusive hospital orderly, or it could be just in his head. Peter sees a random young girl on the street early in the film, and immediately after we hear her screaming. While the scene is shot to suggest that he abducted and murdered her, later on the film indicates that there was no murder, and it's debatable if the girl even existed.
