Review of Red Lights (2012) by Shawne ~ — 30 Jul 2012

In my mind, Red Lights had a lot going for it - it's director Rodrigo Cortes' follow-up to his daringly claustrophobic Buried, a pacey, thrilling film about one man stuck in a box that managed the pretty incredible feat of being simultaneously heart-stopping and heartbreaking. On the strength of that calling card (his first English film), he gathered a pretty formidable cast for this project, pitching young and beautiful indie darlings Cillian Murphy and Elizabeth Olsen against revered film veterans Robert De Niro and Sigourney Weaver.

Cortes even had a decent enough plot - jaded, cynical psychologist Dr Margaret Matheson (Weaver) and her physicist sidekick Tom Buckley (Murphy) are the best you've got when it comes to debunking apparently paranormal phenomena... which leaves Tom in frustrated confusion when the ball-busting Margaret quails from taking on the enigmatic Simon Silver (De Niro), a world-renowned blind psychic who emerges from a thirty-year retirement for a series of increasingly popular public appearances. Surely some form of movie alchemy - with a serving of juicy drama and some thrills on the side - would result from this mix of personalities and premise... how could it not?

Sadly, Red Lights is pretty much proof of how the best ingredients do not a gourmet dish make if the chef loses track of just what he's trying to create. It seems pretty evident that Cortes is hoping to create something akin to The Sixth Sense, a horror film that doubled as a smart, weighty psychological thriller. Instead, he produces a movie that's... well, neither here nor there. The build-up is dreary and more than a little boring, substituting clunky exposition for character development. There is a particularly hamfisted scene in which Weaver's character stands at her broken son's bedside and explains to Tom in ponderous dialogue why she has no religious convictions. De Niro's first frontal close-up in the film is also an inexplicable moment in which his character is about to deplane, removes his glasses to prove just how blind he is, and then puts them back on again. Was that visual flourish really necessary?

Even when the film picks up its pace, heading into thriller territory, there is precious little to recommend it. The confrontations between Tom and Simon are overwrought, while the little twists and shocks that pepper the second half of the film annoy rather than intrigue. Speaking as someone who's chickenshit and pretty easy to scare, there weren't even any particularly good spine-tingling moments. A spectacularly violent bathroom scene near the end combines all the worst of these faults: more shocking than scary, almost gratuitously so, the outcome of the melee in the lavatory doesn't even really make sense. There's a way to make it fit, I suppose, when the final revelation unspools across the last five minutes of the film's running time - but it still doesn't make one feel any less cheated of a good ending... much less a good movie.

The only reason Red Lights didn't go straight to DVD is its cast - I would watch De Niro, Weaver and even Murphy in just about anything, and this trio of actors do manage to deliver the occasional reward as they stumble through Cortes' script. Weaver makes the brittle, tough Margaret fascinating and sympathetic, while Murphy heroically drags the film around on his shoulders. But it really says something when even De Niro - who is pretty much a legend-for-hire these days - comes across as trapped in the pretentious speechifying to which his character is prone.

Cortes is still a film-maker to watch; there are moments in Red Lights that wring considerable tension from tiny moments, when his characters dwell in shadows and doubts and then have things go awry and explode around them. But, on the basis of this film, he's going to have to work a lot harder to prove himself deserving of the calibre of actors he's starting to draw to his projects.