Director James Ashcroft gets points for maintaining a consistently creepy atmosphere of unsettling dread, but that can’t compensate for a storyline that relies too heavily on coincidence, contrivance and just plain stupid behavior by the primary characters.
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| Tom (Adam Scott) and his young son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) initially are optimistic about their move to a new community ... but they'll soon have second thoughts, starting with the quietly malevolent house in which they've chosen to live. |
All these years later, children still frighten each other by chanting a macabre poem generated by those tragedies:
If your window’s left unlatched,
You’ll hear him tapping at the glass.
Disturbingly — as the film begins — a young boy, Neil Spencer, has just gone missing. The search team is led by local police Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan), and the group discovers a body ... but this one is years decomposed.
Elsewhere, Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott) and his 8-year-old son, Jake (Acston Luca Porto), have just driven to Garretton, hoping for a fresh start following the tragic loss of Tom’s wife, and the boy’s mother. Depending on the camera angle, looking through the front windshield, there either is — or isn’t — somebody sitting in the back seat behind Tom.
As we soon learn, this is Jake’s special imaginary friend.
“Your mom always wanted us to move back to the town we grew up in,” Tom says. His relationship with Jake is loving, but strained; Tom can see that his son still is damaged goods, and he tries hard to compensate. Jake, in turn, carries his “packet of special things” wherever he goes.
So, okay; moving to Garretton is prompted by a valid reason ... but why did Tom pick this particular house in which to live? It’s a massive, ominous three-story affair, large enough for a family of eight, laden with huge, empty rooms that exude a palpable level of dread: completely impractical for just two people.
(As it eventually transpires, this house is a poor choice for several unpleasant reasons: merely the first of this dumb script’s numerous contrivances.)
So, they settle in. Jake begins school; Tom, a novelist, hopes this environment will help overcome a serious case of writer’s block.
A brief cutaway reveals poor Neil (Exavier Montanez) locked in a tiny room, being terrorized by a deranged hooded sicko, whose whispered platitudes are wholly at odds with his eventual intentions.
Detective Beck, meanwhile, has become convinced that they’re dealing with a copycat killer who is mimicking the long-ago crimes. She contacts long-retired cop Peter Willis (Robert De Niro), who caught the “Whisper Man,” Frank Carter (Michael Keaton), back in the day. Willis has remained obsessed by the fact that they never found the body of Carter’s fifth victim.
As it happens, Willis also is Tom’s long-estranged father.
Beck and Willis begin to work together, and the latter realizes that he’ll need to chat with Carter, who has been imprisoned ever since. Carter has long refused to talk to anybody else, and their eventual conversation — with Beck at Willis’ side — is one of this film’s few legitimately unsettling moments, thanks to De Niro’s grim under-playing and Keaton’s impressively creepy performance. Carter is superficially affable, mocking and downright scary. His eyes are black holes that bespeak an absence of soul.
No surprise: Jake soon goes missing ... but only because the boy lacks anything approaching common sense, particularly after he and his father have witnessed a frightening visit from the blue-gloved maniac we earlier saw menacing Neil.
This forces Tom to reunite with his father: an initially prickly dynamic that will thaw in time. (Obviously.)
But as the story lurches along, Tom’s reckless behavior become increasingly difficult to swallow ... along with the fact that Beck would allow so much interference from a civilian. Scott, a so-so actor much more comfortable with lightweight material, never successfully sells his role here.
De Niro, on the other hand, is excellent as always. His Willis is a deliberately quieter, more introspective contrast to Scott’s too-twitchy Tom. That said, these events grant De Niro plenty of opportunities for his signature frowns and scowls, as Willis works the case; De Niro also credibly handles the cautious watchfulness with which Willis attempts to reconcile with his son.
Monaghan is similarly solid as Detective Beck, exuding intelligence, sharp perception and crisp authority. We don’t doubt for a moment that Beck is respected by her colleagues.
Hamish Linklater pops up midway through these events, as Norman Collins, a polished but unnerving academic type who collects artifacts from gruesome murders and serial killers. (Hey, everybody’s got to have a hobby, right?) Beck naturally believes that his oh-so-convenient interest in the ongoing investigation is more than mere curiosity, and Linklater exudes a condescending air of superiority.
Everything builds to a pell-mell climax that Ashcroft, Jacoby and Palmer don’t set up very well — having drifted far from North’s book, by this point — and which has virtually no surprises (although one quick final scene brings an unexpected bit of unexpected closure).
The production values are respectable. Production designer Anastasia White establishes a credible sense of time and place, and cinematographer Peter Deming employs plenty of disorienting camera angles, in order to heighten the atmosphere of dread.
Ultimately, though, this film is a case of too many poor narrative choices, with the actors left struggling — and failing —to sell the clumsy plot.
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