Red Flag

When I was vacationing in London in the summer, I noticed a movie poster in every other Underground station advertising a film called Red Lights. It appeared to be a spooky kind of movie. It starred Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver, and Robert De Niro. How had I never heard of this movie back in the States? When I returned home, I promptly put the movie into my Netflix queue. The movie -- which I'd still not really bothered to learn any more about -- was released on DVD not long ago, and I finely got to see what some clever ad designer had effectively managed to sell to me.

Sigourney Weaver plays a college professor who debunks reports of psychic phenomena with the help of her teaching assistant, Cillian Murphy. But the "Moby Dick" from earlier in her career, the one professed psychic she never disproved, was a mentalist and performer played by Robert De Niro. Now, after decades of retirement, De Niro's character is re-emerging into the spotlight, and Murphy's character is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery his mentor could not.

Red Lights is indeed a spooky, weird movie that strikes an effective tone right from the beginning. The three major characters are perhaps a bit shallow, but the committed performances of the actors lifts up that shortcoming in the script. I found myself very pulled in as the story unfolded, loving the atmosphere and eager to see where the story wound up.

Unfortunately, where it did wind up was frankly terrible. The overall final impression I had was that writer-director Rodrigo Cortés was a pale imitation of M. Night Shyamalan. (Though perhaps not as pale an imitation as recent M. Night is of his own earlier self.) There are a few clever ideas in the mix, and a real innate talent for staging and camera placement that makes for dramatic storytelling. But there's also a need to cram a twist in at the end, a lame reveal that upends everything you saw before. The ending of Red Lights is not a revelation, but an undermining of everything that came before. It's stupid and ridiculous.

In deference to how much I was enjoying the film until that point, I think I'm going to grade the final product a B. Ordinarily, that would be well in the range of a movie I'd normally recommend to others. But in this case, you're going to have to make your own evaluation. Is a good story determined in your mind more by the destination or the journey? If it's going to bother you that the ending stinks (and again, let me not mince words here -- it's terrible), or will you still find enjoyment in a movie that's solid for its first 90 minutes?

Plan accordingly.