‘Naked Singularity’: Film Review | San Francisco 2021
David Rooney
Sergio De La Pava’s PEN prize-winning debut novel,
A Naked Singularity, is a messy, maximalist slab of stream-of-consciousness prose in which the main storyline is a perfect crime, wrapped in digressions on countless subjects, among them astrophysics, philosophy, boxing and the deeply flawed American justice system. Screenwriter Chase Palmer, best known for adapting Stephen King’s
It, tackles this challenging source material with verve in his first feature as director, which premieres as the opener of the San Francisco Film Festival. It’s a slick package and reasonably entertaining, but the indefinite article of the book’s title is not the only thing lost.