Joint Body is a 2011 American crime thriller film written and directed by Brian Jun and starring Mark Pellegrino and Alicia Witt.

[1] While doing time in prison for a violent offense, Nick Burke (Mark Pellegrino) is visited by his wife who informs him that after waiting for seven years, she is divorcing him and has taken out a restraining order against him to prevent him from seeing their daughter.

At the motel, Nick meets a lonely and troubled stripper named Michelle Page (Alicia Witt), whose isolated life is interrupted by the deaths of her elderly neighbors.

One morning, Michelle's former acquaintance Danny Wilson (Tom Guiry), whom she hasn't seen in three years, shows up after his three-year tour of duty in Afghanistan, expecting to rekindle their relationship.

When Michelle rejects his advances and his demands for a personal reward for his service to his country, he sticks a gun in her face and brutally rapes her in her room.

The relationship between the two brothers remains strained, yet Nick reaches out to make some familial connection with Dean, whose only advice is to "disappear".

[2] In his review in Cranes Are Flying, Robert Kennedy wrote that Pellegrino and Witt are "both excellent", but that the film suffered from the director's script, which was "abysmally weak".

[4] Kennedy went on to write: The narrative couldn't be more hackneyed and stereotypical, where there's no investment whatsoever in a unique idea or vision, where the audience is rather appalled at the choices the characters make, as they appear to be smarter than that.