Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Night Shyamalan, Hayley Mills
Have I Seen It Before: Never. If it doesn’t play at Circle, and it isn’t on the schedule for Beyond the Cabin in the Woods, I’m going to have to make a real effort to catch it in theaters.
Did I Like It: Lora said the best thing about this film, and I have not seen the thought expressed anywhere else. So, it needs to be shared:
The real twist in the film is that they got Hayley Mills out of retirement to spring a trap on a parent.
Now everybody can see why I married her.
But to the question of just what the twist is. There are a couple of minor turns of fate that change the course of the movie, but no real moment where the entirety of the movie you’ve just been watching suddenly becomes an entirely different movie. Maybe the minor debacle of Glass (2019) scared him off thing that made his famous, but I couldn’t help but think it showed a great degree of restraint to not make it so that the killer’s wife (Allison Pill) was in on the killings the whole time, or the whole family, or FBI profiler Josephine Grant (Mills, trapping parents left and right) was actually Cooper’s (Hartnett) mother… Or, I don’t know… The whole concert was populated by aliens. I applaud M. Night from moving on from this construction. Now if only I as a viewer could get out of the mode where I’m trying to second guess the plot as it unfurls. It’s the least I could do for him, but that would be the precise moment he drops a new twist ending on us.
Hartnett is the film’s real secret strength. Channeling the right amount of at-his-peak John Ritter, he feels perfectly harmless for the film’s opening act, and the performance increasingly makes him seem both terrifying and brilliant in the implementation of that terror.
And it’s good that Hartnett’s performance makes him seem smart, because the plot reflexively swings for lucky breaks as opposed to deserving—even in a sick sort of way—to get out of his predicament. It’s truly a merely serviceable screenplay that keeps this from being great.