Psychologist Magaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) has a bone to pick with hack clairvoyants. Her assistant, physicist Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy), while still an adherent to the empirical, has a slightly less skeptical approach. Regardless, the pair of researchers happily debunk paranormal activity with few hitches, until a world renowned psychic, Simon Silver, comes out of retirement. Things take a turn for the supernatural when the pair of researchers attempt to discredit the mysterious blind psychic.
Part incoherent whodunnit, part supernatural thriller, Red Lights is full of exploding light bulbs, jumping tables and levitating A-listers, but lacks anything that could be remotely verified as decent dialogue. Red Lights is a psychic Frankenstein’s monster of a movie that shifts tone too abruptly from pseudo-introspective procedural to corny action-thriller. Like the faux-psychics around which this film is built, director Cortez seems to be more interested in impressing us with stylistic sleight of hand than working any real magic.
If nothing else, Red Lights is proof that you can make any film semi-decent with a cast of talented actors: Weaver adds pathos to a script that bombards her with pages of professorial exposition, Murphy has several excellent (albeit over-the-top) moments, and Deniro exudes a sense of menace that makes his onscreen character highly engaging, if not completely memorable. The trio manage to haul the train wreck of a thriller into the zone of ‘somewhat watchable’, rather than stranded in filmic disaster.
Red Lights culminates in a twist ending that, like The Prestige, makes us rethink the entire film. Rather than leaving us in a state of awe, however, the emotion evoked is likely to be slight annoyance at what seems to be more copout than deliberate decision.
Summary: A second-rate parlour trick
RATING: 2.5 out of 5 stars
Raphael Lim