I was initially rather excited to see this Stephen Kind re-adaptation, as its director Keith Thomas was responsible for The Vigil, one of the finest low budget horror films of the last decade or so. Which I apparently never wrote about here, because I prefer wading through crap instead, apparently. This, alas, leads us to this awkward mess of a movie.
This is no The Vigil, heck, it’s barely a coherent movie, but rather a movie consisting of three acts that share neither mood nor themes, and while there’s little technically wrong with Thomas’s direction, it does nothing to fix any of the problems it inherited from its embarrassment of a script. Credited to Scott Teems (who also co-wrote Halloween Kills, so no surprise there) is an awful mess that can’t decide if this is supposed to be a psychological horror movie about repression and generational trauma, a bad X-Men origin story, a conspiracy thriller, one of those po-faced “what if superpowers were happening in the Real World™” things, or what? Fusing any of this reasonably or effectively is of course completely beyond the ambitions or abilities on display here.
Because that’s not bad enough the film is full of random scenes that have no bearing on anything that comes before or after. What’s with Kurtwood Smith’s one scene appearance, for example? Why is he vomiting up a hairball of exposition so pointless, the film’s never going to pick up on it again. Character ethics, motivations and behaviour change from scene to scene without any proper development laying the groundwork for these changes, and narrative flow is a thing other movies do. Also, why the hell do the filmmakers believe finishing by putting its main character kid into the care of the violent psychopath who murdered her mother (as well as a lot of other people) in cold blood is a positive ending? Even King in his most coked-up incarnation knew better than that.
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