THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES
© 2002 Screen Gems

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THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES

The inspiration for this X-FILES-ish exercise in creepy atmospherics is a 1975 book by John A. Keel about a series of encounters with a mysterious "Mothman" in and around the small town of Point Pleasant, W. Va., over a period of 13 months in 1966-67. Keel recorded stories of various locals seeing, hearing and in general having their lives disrupted by this seemingly otherworldly being, whom they sometimes gave the colorful name Indrid Cold.

The film pulls anecdotes from Keel's "true" material and weaves them into a present-day fictional thriller about a Washington Post reporter named John Klein (Richard Gere) who, following the death of his beloved young wife (Debra Messing from TV's WILL AND GRACE), takes a drive one night and ends up in Point Pleasant 400 miles from where he logically should be given his speed and direction. Trying to figure out what has happened to him only brings more questions as Klein is drawn into the lives of a local man haunted by strangely prophetic dreams (ARMAGEDDON's Will Patton) and a sheriff's deputy (Gere's PRIMAL FEAR co-star Laura Linney) trying to keep order in a town that seems to be slowly going bonkers.

What follows is kind of a reverse BLAIR WITCH; instead of fictional events passed off as low-rez, shaky-cam reality, we have allegedly real events given the stylized cinematic treatment, with the most Hollywood of leading men as our obsessed, beautifully lit metaphysical sleuth. With former music video director Mark Pellington pulling the strings, most of this is good, trippy fun off-kilter compositions, shadow-filled spaces, capable actors playing scared and, perhaps most impressively, evocative sound effects that push all sorts of nightmare buttons in the brain without drawing undue attention to themselves.

For about two-thirds of the film's running time, Pellington and screenwriter Richard Hatem mine a nice little pocket of supernatural dread by keeping their true agenda as hidden from view as the title character. It isn't initially clear exactly what kind of movie we're seeing, and the idea (as highly skeptical as a thinking viewer must be) that some part of all this may have actually happened gives everything an extra little zing. Every thriller should be lucky enough to flash an ominous "based on true events" title at its beginning.

Unfortunately, as with so many mysteries, the riddles the film poses are a lot more interesting than its solutions, and by the time we get to the surprisingly conventional action finish the filmmakers have lost a lot of the narrative steam they worked so hard to generate early on. And things end on a bad note when the twist that is intended as the film's final kick plays as its most contrived moment of all, a matter the filmmakers worsen by then over-explaining it to the audience in a painful flash of the sort of expository overkill Hatem's otherwise intelligent script usually does a good job of avoiding.