BEFORE: Cate Blanchett carries over again from "Notes on a Scandal", and as I head in to the holiday weekend and get very close to the halfway point of my year, it seems a lot of actors are reaching that threshold, where they'll be listed in my end-of-year wrap-up, usually the people with three or more appearances. Cate will be there, and now so will Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank, and of course J.K. Simmons. It feels like I've seen a lot of Simmons this year already, but this is only his fourth appearance in 2019, after "The Snowman", "The Meddler" and "The Front Runner". Believe it or not, for him that constitutes a slow year - in 2017 he was in 7 films.
THE PLOT: A woman with extrasensory perceptions asked to help find a young woman who has disappeared.
AFTER: I've got to start with one of the most blatant NITPICK POINTS I've ever seen - Annie, the lead character with the psychic ability, uses a very non-standard deck of cards when she gives her psychic readings. She's using the set of symbols that we normally see being used if films to TEST for psychic ability - you know, the circle, the square, the star, the wavy lines. How the heck are these symbols supposed to help her predict the future or give advice? Did some screenwriter not know the exact nature of these cards to the psychic world, and just completely blew it here? Or was this a conscious effort to use something OTHER than a tarot deck or a ouija board, both of which could be seen as semi-Satanic in nature? I guess the psychic power is in the reader, not the cards, but the tarot deck just seems so perfectly designed for telling fortunes - and my understanding is that even a regular deck of cards could be used for fortune-telling, as long as everyone agrees what each of those 52 cards represents - and both parties agree that even though the cards are dealt out randomly, that random order has a larger potential meaning. But the "Zener" cards are just not meant for telling fortunes, they have a very different, singular purpose. And there are only five different designs, how could those be used to do a reading? So story FAIL here.
To be fair, this film is about so much more than a psychic giving readings and having visions, but that stuff plays a pretty big part. It's also about the unspoken things that take place in a small town in Georgia, from affairs to spousal abuse to father-son sexual abuse, right on up to murder. You know, all the good stuff. Annie seems to be at the center of it all, because she gives psychic readings to the broken people, the abused, the desperate, and the mentally defective. It's tough to know if she's really helping them, or just giving them some hope to cling to as they circle the drain. Plus, this puts her in conflict with the abusive spouses and the people in power, who accuse her of being either a fake or a witch or some combination of both.
But when a young woman disappears, the police and the woman's distraught father and fiancé come to her for help, only that's not how her power seems to work. It's only later, when she's alone, that she has dreams or visions of a woman in chains, floating as if under water. She remembers enough details of the dream to relate them to the police, and for them to find the one pond (out of dozens in the county) that contains the woman's body. It's one thing for a character to believe in their own psychic ability, it's another thing entirely when they're proven right, to any degree. The bigger question then becomes not where the woman's body is, but who put it there? The biggest suspect is the man who owns the land the pond is on, for many reasons - but the fact that this man also threatened Annie puts the accusation from Annie under suspicion.
Then there's the fact that there's no real legal precedent for a psychic vision constituting evidence. Legally there's no such thing as ESP, so you can't use a vision to get a search warrant or justify one woman's dreams as a reason to focus on a suspect. Yet even though the movie makes this point here (by having the D.A. call this part of the case the "weak link") the case still goes through anyway, and nobody seems to have a problem with it. The defendant's attorney must have studied law at the same university that trains all the lawyers on "Law & Order: SVU", the ones who suddenly forget how to make an objection or file a motion to dismiss when there's two minutes left in the episode, and the confession still needs to take place.
Another similarity to "Law & Order" - you know there's got to be a twist, right? Twenty minutes into every episode of any "Law & Order" show, when the cops are making their first arrest, you can always just shout out, "He didn't do it..." and 99% of the time, you'd be right. Same goes here. But then who did, and how many more twists will there be? There are a few doozies here, and I don't want to give out any spoilers here, but it's the same narrative trick that I've seen a few times already this year, so now I've got to add this one to THAT list for the end of the year, too.
But there are inconsistencies here too, as often happens with these types of mysteries, once you know the final answer, and you go back and think about what went before, it's very easy to see that some things don't fall into place, and say, "Well, OK, but then why did THAT person do THAT?" If you put too many red herrings in a crime story (and there are plenty here) it's sort of bound to happen.
Also starring Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Keanu Reeves (last heard in "Keanu"), Katie Holmes (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Greg Kinnear (last seen in "Movie 43"), Hilary Swank (last seen in "The Core"), Michael Jeter (last seen in "True Crime"), Kim Dickens (last seen in "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children"), Gary Cole (last seen in "Breach"), Rosemary Harris (last seen in "This Means War"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Chelcie Ross (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), John Beasley, Rebecca Koon, Erik Cord, with a cameo from Danny Elfman.
RATING: 5 out of 10 slices of chocolate cake
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