*SPOILER ALERT*
(2010. dir: Omar Naim) Mangled attempt at a "night-sea journey" movie (Siesta, Jacob's Ladder, the Machinist) so useless that it never even pushes off-shore, just keeps chasing its own tail in the tide-pools, filling time until the contrived sap of its ending.
Dylan (Nick Stahl) works at a funeral parlor in his hometown, having given up on life when his parents were killed in an accident and when, in his grief, he lost his soul-mate (Amy Smart) to another man. He stages his own death (obituary, wake, even tombstone) in a wild attempt to glean whether anyone would care. Or is he really dead, and trapped in a purgatorial dimension? When an unknown woman shows up at his coffin-side, leading him into her dark world, everything turns weird and hallucinatory.
Only not enough so. A true success in this genre melds reality and hallucination so seamlessly that you eventually stop trying to sort them and relax into the march of the story toward the ineluctable, melancholy release which ends it. The ending should feel like a destiny, meted out gently by demiurgic Fates. The motives and conditioning forces buffeting the beleaguered lead should be compelling enough (unacknowledged death, extreme guilt) to warrant the living nightmare. A second viewing should reinforce that the writer knew from the beginning which characters belong to which world: actual, hallucinated, or something in between.
This one makes a mess of it, then throws in the towel completely and stops pretending to be other than hogwash with its forced happy ending. To give the writer his due, it feels like The Evil Studio intervened at the last minute, and that the original, more interesting ending (that his Irish friends are in fact his dead parents) got tossed. The Rose McGowan character, a tweaker with a debt to pay, is even more problematic, and her story doesn't hold up under the barest scrutiny. How could she steal the ring and pawn it under the circumstances? Only if the whole "underworld" she shows him is an "otherworld", pawn shop and mob thugs included, and solid items, like a ring, can traverse the walls between them. Which would have been a more interesting road to travel, right? But someone, possible The Evil Studio, didn't have the grit to follow it through.
I feel bad for Nick Stahl. He deserves better than this.
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