Susan Granger’s review of “Red Lights” (Millennium Entertainment)
The promising premise of this psychological thriller involves supernatural debunking or how phony psychics, ghost whisperers and faith healers convince the gullible public that they possess special powers to access the ephemeral spiritual world.
Veteran paranormal researchers Dr. Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) discredit these charlatans by detecting what Matheson calls “red lights,” the subtle subterfuges behind every staged occurrence. But when renowned, Uri Geller-like blind psychic Simon Silver (Robert De Niro) emerges from a 30-year retirement, Matheson is hesitant, advising her colleague to back off, fearing sinister Silver’s malicious revenge. But Buckley and his girlfriend/student Sally (Elizabeth Olsen) are determined to expose the sham.
Instead of developing the intriguing potential, writer/director Rodrigo Cortes (“Buried”) gets overinvolved with contrived chattering and schlocky, gimmicky scares, ripping off Brian De Palma’s classic “Carrie” for the ridiculously convoluted climax. Cortes reportedly spent a year and a half researching and writing the screenplay, concluding that both skeptics and believers omit evidence that doesn’t support their position.
In promotional interviews, De Niro admitted there may be something to the phenomena’s practitioners: “There’s no way they could have known certain things and they said them, so in that sense, I have no answer than to say that I have to believe that there’s something there that they pick up psychically. I don’t know what it is.”
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Red Lights” is a flimsy, faltering 4, a fraudulent disappointment.
