Reviews

I tried to like this movie but I found it pretty underwhelming, largely because of the highly implausible events of the first act.

So Pattinson's character brings his mentally-challenged brother with him to a bank robbery....which no bank robber ever would ever do. Then shockingly it doesn't go well and his brother is arrested. Pattinson can't come up with the money to bail his brother out, so a few scenes later he casually walks into a hospital where his brother is being hospitalized after being beaten up in jail, sits down and talks to a healthcare professional who straight up tells him where the prisoners are kept in the building....which would never happen, that type of information is privileged. Then Pattinson waits until the cop outside his brother's hospital room goes to the vending machines for a coffee and gets him into a wheelchair and gets him out of the room. By the way.....the cop would never just leave a criminal unsupervised like that. So, again.....that wouldn't happen. It gets better, then Pattinson wheels his brother right out the front of the Hospital--still dressed in a gown and unconscious--without anyone questioning them. Ask yourself, reader, this: have you ever seen anyone discharged from the hospital in a hospital gown? Did the cop at the front desk, and yes there is one at the front desk, get kicked off the force for incompetence? So then him and his brother get on a bus and leave the hospital grounds. They find themselves asking a woman and her daughter if they can come in to use her phone. It's implied that Pattinson has met this woman before albeit briefly, but still she lets this person right into her house without question. Then when Pattinson says he's going to have to wait in a Dunkin Donuts for a ride this woman who barely knows him gives him a room to stay in in her house. Yes! That's a great idea! Give a near-stranger who shows up at night to your doorstep a room in your house! What is happening in this movie!? Am I on drugs or is everyone in this movie a moron?? Later Pattinson beats up a security guard, frames him as a trespasser while dressed in the guard's clothes and then decides (after the cops take said security guard away) that a great place to hide would be the security guard's house. Y'know, one of the first places cops would look if they knew someone had taken someone's house keys.

I could go on and on about the nonsense in this movie but I'll just stop it here. For the record, I'm not saying that I can't suspend my disbelief when it comes to watching movies. I can watch movies where there's some plot holes or have sort of ridiculous premise or where there's fantastical coincidences occurring and stuff like that. But with this movie the people who wrote the script use plot holes to ADVANCE THE MOVIE ALONG because they couldn't think of logical ways to.

5/10

For the record I think John Lithgow is a great actor. Having said that, this movie is a mess. The dream sequences don't help the film and the jumping around in the narrative's timeline was not done well. The fact that Cain is a figment of Carter's imagination is way too obvious way too early into the film.

The dream sequences distort what's real or what isn't whenever they occur in this movie, and not in a good way (ie: a David Lynch arty sort of way) What made me turn this movie off was when they show Carter's wife drowning in a car pushed into a lake by Cain. A few scenes later the police are viewing her body and noting that her fingernails were raw from trying to "claw her way out of the car"

Then about 5 minutes later she's back in the movie totally alive with no explanation as to what the hell happened, attacking Carter.

At that point I realized I couldn't really trust what was happening in the movie and decided it wasn't worth it anymore.

4/10

It's a bit too long at just over two hours. Otherwise, very solid horror movie.

...there are too many scenes--close to around 80% of the movie--where the camera is shaky. I don't understand what the aesthetic appeal of this sort of cinematography is. This flaw brings my overall grade down from what would have been an 8 to a 7.

Other than that, great film. Not much of a horror movie but more of a serial killer movie.