In Red Lights, Cillian Murphy comes this close to making out with Cillian Murphy.
It happens in a rote nightmare sequence at the height of his character’s supernatural crisis. Cillian Murphy’s soul clings to the roof of his apartment, while Cillian Murphy’s body lies in bed, unblissfully asleep. The soul descends ever so slowly toward its host body, until it looks like the two Cillians are about to lock lips when – like rom-com characters pulled apart from each other before their first pucker – Cillian wakes up in a sweaty jolt, which itself is a Hollywood cliché.
Out-of-body experiences are serious stuff, but, just like everything else in Red Lights, their depiction is unintentionally comic and hopelessly naïve. Writer-director Rodrigo Cortes appears to know nothing about how physical world works, let alone the metaphysical one.
Murphy plays Tom Buckley, the physicist assistant to psychologist Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver). They teach at a local university and specialize in debunking paranormal phenomena; in one silly scene, Margaret lectures on how to pretend to levitate a table. The faithless, tormented Margaret is a staunch believer that death is the end; she’s kept her vegetable of a son alive since the age of 4 (the comatose boy is a grown man now) because she won’t release him into a void of nothingness. When she finds evidence of a world beyond our own, she says, she’ll unplug him.
Tom’s reasons for devoting his career to the paranormal are less clear, but one thing is for certain: He wants to investigate world-famous psychic Simon Silver (Robert De Niro), a blind showman who has just returned from a 30-year retirement brought on by the sudden death of a skeptical journalist. Tom pursues the case against Margaret’s wishes, only to find himself terrorized by inexplicable sources – lights and machines malfunction, birds slam against his windows, objects in his home scatter and shatter, and visions of a grim Simon Silver haunt him day and night.
Elizabeth Olsen is unfortunately cast in the degrading part of Tom’s girlfriend Sally, a student whom Tom meets in an early scene and apparently within days is living with him; she functions as little more than an ornament and sounding board for Tom. Toby Jones, another fine actor, is cast as a rival university professor specializing in the paranormal, but the way his character is written, he’s a dubious dupe who will believe anything – hardly professorial material.
It’s no surprise these actors give less than their A games to a D product like this, and the same can be said for the above-the-title stars. Weaver puts significantly more wit and heart into her current role on USA’s Political Animals, Murphy makes more of an impact in his five-minute cameo in The Dark Knight Rises than in the 113 minutes of Red Lights, and De Niro’s performance consists of more ham than a butcher shop.
Most of the film’s problems, though, lie with writer-director Cortes, for imagining scenarios so ludicrous that the movie never gains any credibility. The media hysteria that greets Silver’s comeback is particularly knee-slapping. It must be a slow news period in the world of Red Lights, because the old man’s return to mentalism is the only thing that ever turns up on television, radio or newspapers.
The day after a televised debate in which Margaret spars verbally with a panel full of Silver supporters and storms off the set in frustration, Tom slaps a newspaper on Margaret’s desk bearing this above-the-fold headline, in large bold type: MATHESON TURNS SILVER INTO GOLD. I could see this on the inside page of a New York Post-style tabloid, but there’s no estimable newspaper in the world that would run a story like this on its front page, let alone with so sensationalistic a headline.
This might sound trivial, but it’s just one example of a film that never gets the details right, let alone the big picture. The story only gets more and more inane as it progresses, concluding in a pathetic twist ending that can only be described as an epic fail of the highest order. All the levitators, spoon-benders and faith healers out there, shams or not, deserve much better cinematic representation than this.
RED LIGHTS. Director: Rodrigo Cortes; Cast: Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, Elizabeth Olsen, Toby Jones, Craig Roberts; Distributor: Millennium Films; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most theaters