![]() ![]() Catherine spends the first half of the film feeling trapped in a roomy yet empty space, wanting more and frustrated that she’s not getting it – a feeling the viewer comes to sympathize with all too well.Elizabeth Brundage’s 2016 novel “All Things Cease to Appear” is part ghost story and part mystery, set across multiple decades in and around an upstate New York farmhouse where unimaginable tragedies keep occurring. As is, they stop short in places and go overboard in others, resulting in a misfire diverting only in fits and starts. Focus and economy, two qualities sorely lacking in Berman and Pulcini’s approach to the material, could’ve gotten this uneven effort to do something fresh with a hidebound mode of horror into working order. The notion of permeability between our plane and the next, spelled out in an epigram title card from theologian Emanuel Swedenborg musing on mortality, does supply the film with a strange and ballsy “so, uh, here’s this!” sort of ending.īut that scene, wondrous and inexplicable and charged with the primal power of the natural world, only serves to remind an audience that they’ve spent the preceding film accepting less. All the possibly cursed rings and visions of early 20th-century family discord hang on the acrimony between the central couple like ill-fitting clothes, what should be an ambiguous presence made to resemble the standard paranormal activity. The script arranges itself around his nefariousness and his wife’s response to it, making the myriad subplots into distractions from the trashier intrigue we should be pursuing.Ĭatherine’s investigation into her home’s morbid past similarly accomplishes little beyond gumming up the works and elongating the run time past the two-hour mark. In the case of either of George’s colleagues, whether that’s the friendly and paternal department head (F Murray Abraham) or his more skeptical peer (Rhea Seehorn) who bonds with Catherine, it’s a given that they will ultimately be dispatched for standing in George’s way. The second a strapping young local boy (Alex Neustaedter) stops by to offer his services as a handyman and make googly eyes at Catherine, we know they’re going to bone, in the same respect as when George stops to briefly chat Caravaggio with comely undergrad Willis (Natalia Dyer). The thin tertiary characters existing solely to nudge the plot this way or that have a way of laying out their whole fate within moments of their first appearance. Berman and Pulcini bank on suspense, despite a queasy inevitability being the strongest thing this retread of the familiar has going for it. Regardless of the greater significance attached to the actions each character takes, their motivations and outcomes announce themselves well in advance to destroy any attempted sense of mystery. And yet their dull-edged filmmaking overcooks any clever novelty of the original text in potboiler waters, until it’s all but indistinguishable from the dashed-off horror-tinged thrillers Netflix pumps out en masse to fill their library. The pedigree of co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, Oscar nominees once upon a time for their American Splendor screenplay, would suggest that they recognized a worthy concept in Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear when they took the job adapting it. By the conclusion, she’s achieved a grisly form of freedom. She begins the film in thrall of his toxic influence, internalizing his offhanded criticisms and expelling them in the form of bulimia during her first scene. Like a trusted confidante urging her out of a bad relationship, the supernatural elements complement and comment upon the primary plot thread of her curdling marriage, rather than terrorizing for their own sake. Catherine feels like a hostage in her own home, and though the ominously buzzing night-lights and hallucinations of bloodied mutant fetuses in the kitchen sink drain aren’t helping her fragile mental state, they’re not the real sources of menace in her life. ![]() ![]() ![]() He’s the most malevolent force in what technically qualifies as a haunted house film, an oddly angled inflection on the mini-genre in which the intrusive specters may have plans of their own and death may not be the worst thing in the world. ![]()
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