Red Lights

My mini Elizabeth Olsen film festival ends with 2012's Red Lights, in which Olsen has a minor role as "the girl." The heavy lifting in this film is done by Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver, and, in one of his many throwaway roles of the past few decades, Robert De Niro.

Murphy and Weaver play paranormal investigators who take a profoundly skeptical view of unexplained phenomena. Weaver has spent her career debunking psychics, hauntings, and other such things. Murphy is her assistant. They work at a university, where funding is scarce. I was unaware that there were classes in how to debunk psychics--it would have been an interesting elective.

De Niro plays a legendary psychic, very Uri Geller-like, who has spent many years in retirement but is emerging for a big tour. He is blind, but is able to read minds, bend spoons, etc. Weaver doesn't want to bother with him, but Murphy is anxious to prove him a fake, even though the last critic De Niro had suffered a mysterious and fatal heart attack.

This is a great set-up, but it just doesn't deliver. Written and directed by Roderigo Cortes, it's an interesting look at the con games of psychics. But some of it just seemed odd. Weaver and Murphy are brought in to debunk a psychic, and seem to have full cooperation of the theater staff. Why, then, did the staff not know that the psychic's staff, which was feeding him information through radio transmitters, were in the booth next door?

Also, an early scene has Weaver discovering a haunting is perpetrated by a young girl who wants to leave the house she has just moved into and go home. But the girl disavows making the table raise during a seance, and Weaver says she knows. So who was making the table raise?

The ending is a let-down, as it involves not one but two scenes of exploding electronics. There's a bit of a twist at the end, but it doesn't have much impact. I was more amused by the use of cards in an experiment involving mind-reading. They are the same cards used by Peter Venkman in an experiment in the opening of Ghostbusters. When you are watching a movie wishing you were seeing another one, that's not good.