Red Lights *NECESSARY SPOILER: Character death

By now I should know that it is best to avoid going into a movie with expectations. It prevents you from truly enjoying a decent movie if your expectations are unattainable. Red Lights was recommended to me a few days ago as a great thriller, so going into the theater I was excited to see something either high octane and fast-paced or slow and smoldering like most movies in its genre. Red Lights is neither, and for the first half of the movie, I was largely disappointed.

In Red Lights, Dr. Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) is a woman who has dedicated her life to weeding out con artists who are posing as healing psychics. Margaret is a skeptic and teaches a university level class on how to identify fraudulent psychics. Her partner and teaching assistant Dr. Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) is an acclaimed physicist. It’s established that Tom is a brilliant young scientist, so both the audience and Margaret question why he’s with her chasing after fake paranormals. Tom skirts the topic gracefully but firmly whenever asked, though his reasons are eventually revealed.

Sally (Elizabeth Olson), a pretty girl who asks the right controversial questions in class, piques Tom’s interest, and they, as movie clichés go, end up sleeping together. She is never fleshed out into a complete character, and the same 2-dimensional fate is accorded to another questioning student Ben (Craig Roberts). Margaret and Tom solve a series of paranormal cases in the beginning of the movie, and the audience is educated on how psychics fake it to make it, which is, admittedly, pretty cool. This part of the movie I guess was designed to establish emotional ties between the characters and the audience, but after forty-five minutes of “character development,” I was ready for something to actually happen.

It seemed like my wish would be granted when Robert De Niro’s shady character Simon Silver was finally introduced. Silver was a famous magician 30 years ago who suddenly retired after a skeptical reporter had a heart attack at his show. There was some initial suspicion surrounding the circumstances of the death, but Silver’s name was cleared. All of this sounded highly intriguing to me, and I was ready for Silver to start blowing things up with his mind or something, but alas, still more character development.

After Margaret is talked into a corner on national television when Silver's assistant asks her about her personal beliefs, Tom is full of righteous indignation that someone would dare to bully his mentor and is raring to go after Silver. Although Margaret warns Tom that Silver took a painful mental and emotional stab at her years ago for researching him, Tom still goes to Silver’s opening show. As soon as he flips the switch on a device that would pick up any radio waves feeding damning information to an earplug on stage, the entire booth he's in explodes. Tom escapes with just a few scratches, but he is now set in his conviction that Silver is a fraud and rigged the booth to prevent investigation.

After the show, Tom finds Margaret comatose on the office floor, and she dies in the hospital as a result of a long-term cardiovascular problem. In a particularly poignant scene that showcased Cillian Murphy’s acting chops, another professor delivers the news of Margaret’s death. I felt the raw pain of Tom’s loss as I watched his composure implode on screen. Although Tom’s devotion to Margaret was true, I kept wondering the whole time what he saw in her. Dr. Margaret was supposed to be emotionally stilted, but Sigourney Weaver’s interpretation of the character had no depth. Weaver had two types of line delivery: either seemingly read off of a teleprompter, or an unsolicited recitation of some boring textbook she’d memorized.

Thankfully, when the film’s focus shifted to Tom following Margaret’s death, the movie vastly improved. After Tom’s break down, strange things start happening around him. Birds fly into windows next to him, he gets phone calls where no one is on the other line, electronics periodically surge and he has terrifying nightmares. The pacing between each incident is perfect, and the tension continues to build as the audience tries to figure out what’s going on. Cillian Murphy does an incredible job of portraying a man’s slow descent into a manic state of paranoia. His sharp cheekbones and under eye circles give him an almost skeletal appearance at times, and director Rodrigo Cortés exploits these facial features with strategically placed lighting as Tom toes the edge of a psychotic break.

Dr. Shackleton (Toby Jones), a colleague of Margaret's, gets permission to host a series of tests to finally prove once and for all if Silver is a fraud. Tom intimidates the doctor into letting him sit in on the process, feeding his growing obsession with Silver. The tests seem to prove beyond a doubt that Silver is the real deal. Tom refuses to believe the results and sets Ben to the task of reviewing all the footage one last time before publishing. Tom leaves Ben at the office and heads to Silver’s show. All of the unexplained paranormal activity builds up to this final confrontation, and believe me, it is well worth the wait. I left the theater satisfied, even with the bland first hour of meandering. For the most part, it was a good film, but recasting Dr. Margaret could have made it an even better one.

Cast & Credits:

Sigourney Weaver
Cillian Murphy
Elizabeth Olson
Toby Jones
Craig Roberts

Versus Entertainment presents a film written and directed by Rodrigo Cortés. Running time: 119 minutes. English. No MPAA rating.