Disclosure Day (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

My favorite moments to experience Spielberg's genius are not necessarily his inventive, culture-shifting ones, but rather those quiet ones when he gently reminds us that he's one of the best filmmakers out there for a reason. The final scenes of this film did that for me.

Helped, I might add, by an amazing actor who commands our attention (and the world's) in the film's climax. I don't know who she is, but she crushes this moment to shine.

In a somewhat climactic opening moment, we're dropped in medias res as Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) attempts to hand over a bogus bag to agents of Wardex, a secretive corporation operating as a US government contractor. Its head, Noah (Colin Firth), will stop at nothing to reclaim, it seems, something Daniel stole from them during his employment. Their efforts now include kidnapping, evidenced by the presence of a cuffed Jane, Daniel's girlfriend (Eve Hewson), and masquerading as FBI agents. It's the sort of opening that thrills even as we're not quite sure what's happening. While we get some cues in their interactions, it takes a few scenes afterward to fully grasp the plot, which feels a risk in something marketed as a blockbuster, but a welcome one. Any film that resists constant rehashing of the plot like too much media these days is already a leg up in my book.

It's not until over half an hour in that the veil starts to lift and we learn -- along with Jane -- that the government has covered up Wardex's experimentations on aliens and their technology. It feels like a spiritual successor to The X-Files, and often visually recalls that sort of grimy bluish-green hue millennials might recall from '90s television viewings. Daniel is carrying, functionally, the truth that is out there: he's working with a team of Wardex defectors to whistleblow and leak videos of alien experimentations to the world. This plan, what they are calling an impending "Disclosure Day," will be the coordinated result of their team, led by Hugo (Colman Domingo), and they're just waiting for a sign. 

Speaking of which: Daniel and Jane's journey -- fleeing Wardex thugs and following unclear instincts and insights to random places -- is told parallel to Margaret Fairchild's journey. Margaret (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist sees a cardinal one day that seems to speak to her, unlocking a psychic ability for her to speak other languages like Russian and Korean without noticing it and understanding people's thoughts by looking them in the eyes. On air that day, she starts clicking and making meaningless sounds before fainting. Apparently only Daniel was able to understand her. Together, they must continue to evade Wardex and Noah -- the latter of whom uses an alien device to attempt mind control on others, specifically Jane -- as they make their way to find Hugo.

I'm still not sure I followed all the plot (it's not my strong suit), and another watch would behoove me. But this is the kind of film that rewards repeat viewings. Veteran writer David Koepp is firing on all cylinders here, piling on ideas and characters and references until it all feels perhaps too much; talk of religion, philosophy, civilization, individualism, and more make for a cerebral chase of it all. Because, narratively, it's just an extended series of chases between people running after their own MacGuffins. Yet even that isn't usual action or crime thriller fare: lensed by master of the craft Janusz Kaminski (and regular Spielberg collaborator), the story moves along as slickly as its camera, which is almost always in fluid motion, keeping us locked in even when things occasionally slow down.

This won't have the staying power of some of Spielberg's other alien- or monster-related films because its main characters are not "everymen," or at least not experts who rise to the occasion to help in a larger-than-life situation. The ultimate reveal of this plot is that Daniel and Margaret were quite literally chosen for this moment of cosmic revelation to humanity. We learn later in the film that they had both been abducted by aliens as children and apparently given their newfound psychic powers as almost biblical witnesses to the truth. Even when they seem a bit too unrealistic, O'Connor and Blunt clearly have fun enlivening their characters with quirks and a certain energy of constantly thinking, "what the heck is happening to me?" Blunt, especially, has to do a lot by merely gazing into someone else's eyes, and she does so with shades of empathy we rarely see on screen, all in lightning-fast shifts in microexpressions that left me often distracted, but blissfully so. She's a powerhouse.

I was also distracted, less blissfully, by the occasionally forced bits of action and spectacle in this film. As the aliens can apparently control and/or masquerade as animals, there are several animals that interact with the characters. All rendered in CGI, it just feels like a disappointingly cheap choice from a team of such craftsmen. The focus on cars feels catering at best, and not just in terms of product placement; though there is a particularly tense moment with some train tracks, it quickly devolves into a ridiculous drag-and-climb stunt piece that completely took me out of the movie. 

Other moments, however, brought me right back in. Revelations that Jane was a novitiate lead to conversations with her Mother Superior (Elizabeth Marvel) that give us really nice insight into the metaphysics of this world. What would we do, after all, with our churches, if we did discover another race of "supreme beings"? More importantly, the film's emotional climax comes when the two leads find Hugo, which basically uses immersive psychology and architecture to provoke Margaret to psychically respond. That feels especially authentic to Spielberg, especially considering that his last film, The Fabelmans, is all about film as a vehicle for nostalgia and, thus, healing. And the lead-up to this film's climax, which is its final scenes, had me squirming on the edge of my seat. I wept, and can't quite explain why. I gasped, but more out of my spirit than out of my nerves. I cheered (quietly) as our heroes race to make their announcement. And then the film ends with a single word that rings like a clarion call.

Some people will be annoyed at the lack of resolution in Disclosure Day, but those are plot people. I'm annoyed by the overabundance of unnecessary actions and spectacle in this film, and would have preferred less chasing and more talking and strategizing. It's a bleak film until the end, and then its hope is almost intoxicating.

Hokum (2026)

Score: 4 / 5

Damian McCarthy has carved out a nasty little niche for himself as a successful auteur, and Hokum is only the third feature-length example of his genius. The Irish filmmaker blew most of us out of the water with his mystery-thriller Caveat and the opening scene of his sophomore film Oddity still gives me nightmares. Combining a contemporary sense of horror timing with timeless Gothic premises, McCarthy's work insightfully scares us, building on a rich sense of place and utilizing an almost primal sense of justice (no religion, per se, not even pagan) to undergird his haunting traps.

And traps they are: each of his films features a single location that contains most of the film's plot, usually with some contrived means of isolating the character so they must battle both inner and outer horrors and, hopefully, emerge better. McCarthy is also a new champion of folk horror, pushing the genre in a direction ripe for theorization. In his stories, the real monsters are humans: corrupted by avarice and externalized insecurities, bad people cover up murder and sundry crimes that unearth or catalyze hauntings. When the troubled protagonist arrives, we're on a journey with him to separate the supernatural from the criminal and bring both justice and peace back to the setting. And, crucially, in McCarthy, the protagonist only makes it with some help from the reliably kind if strange locals. While I didn't care as much for Hokum as Oddity, it fits the bill and managed to scare, delight, and haunt me each of the now three times I've seen it.

So if all this sounds of interest to you, I beseech you to stop reading and watch the film. Part of its pleasure, as a bonafide mystery, is to unravel its plot points, characterizations, and thematic subtleties as you go. But, if you've already seen it or are find with spoilers, let's get into it.

Did I already say there's a contrived plot to get the protagonist to the haunting? Well, here it's even worse than in McCarthy's previous two films. An American writer struggling to finish the end of his trilogy, Ohm Bauman (a troubled and caustic author played by Adam Scott with remarkable sobriety and nuance) books a trip to rural Ireland to dispose of his parents' ashes. Apparently they honeymooned at this remote hotel, so he dumps their ashes at a redwood tree featured in a picture of his beloved mother (I should say that he unceremoniously dumps Dad's ashes, but Mom's are lovingly poured out along the roots). His mother's cause of death from many years prior will be revealed in the film's thematic slow burn, but his alcoholic and abusive father's past is mentioned more fleetingly. 

Other than thematically, the film is by no means a slow burn. Starting with an often humorous flavor, the film introduces us to the quirky people working at the hotel, including a surly groundskeeper slaughtering pesky goats, a creepy wheelchair-bound owner telling ghost stories, the performative and put-upon front desk clerk (and son-in-law of the owner), and the insightful bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh). We get a brief indication that there are local legends of a witch who kidnaps naughty children and leads them in chains through the underworld, but that's surely just a spooky Halloween tale. Indeed, Ohm has arrived on October 30, and a party is about to commence.

Ohm himself, however, is the real character of this film. Gruff and rude to the people around him, he is the kind of person who seems eager to make enemies at every turn. Whether it's the possibly predatory owner of the hotel or a rather pushy bellboy who wants Ohm to read his manuscript, Ohm reacts with funny yet disturbing cruelty to the staff. Actually, he's not a far cry from Stephen King autobiographical caricatures in his own books, like in The Shining or 1409, two stories that seem consciously referenced in Hokum. Curiously, the only person Ohm treats decently is Jerry, a local hermit living off the grid who he meets in the forest; Jerry, high on psychedelic mushrooms that allow him to experience the supernatural world (so he says), provides Ohm with some moonshine, and the two bond in what is easily the film's sweetest scene. It helps, too, that David Wilmot's performance as Jerry is a knockout jolt of energy that this film sorely needs.

Well, that, and the time jump. Ohm tries to kill himself on Halloween Eve and is found and rescued by Fiona and the bellboy. We leap ahead to apparently some days later when Ohm returns to the hotel to collect his belongings, discovering that the hotel is in the process of closing for the season. Fiona, it seems, has been missing since the party, and Jerry is the prime suspect. Confronting Jerry, Ohm learns of his suspicion that Fiona's corpse is still in the hotel (he saw her ghost, you see) and that someone who worked there is guilty of the cover-up. After the staff leave, they break in and locate the Honeymoon Suite, where the ghost directed Jerry to look: a boarded up suite under lock and key due to its status as supposedly haunted by the local witch.

When Jerry is dispatched temporarily by the groundskeeper, Ohm is left alone for the night to explore the hotel, and things get scary fast. The filmmakers highlight long, dusty hallways, hidden doors, disused accoutrements, and negative space with electrifying energy, drawing our eyes with insidious intent into shadowy corners and gaping, dark frames. Like the best of Chekhovian theatre or a cinematic chamber piece, each element of design will have some role to play in the subsequent cat-and-mouse series of encounters between human and inhuman threats, from the dumbwaiter and its time-sensitive mechanics certain to cause logistical problems to the bathtub filled with brown and chunky, unspeakably fetid water. Even elements outside the hotel itself have purpose, with interconnectedness in plot points and theme extending to the goats, the mushrooms, and even the conquistador that opens and closes the film (a character from Ohm's trilogy that offers perhaps too many psychoanalytic and symbolic insights into Ohm's character).

Even with Joseph Bishara's incredible score, this film never feels too big for it britches. We're meant to buy into its mythos and the possibilities of boundaries between reality and horror becoming blurred. We're meant to understand and honor the arcane, spiritual significance of solving a murder for the good of the community. And so, like fairytales and fables that teeter toward darker subject matter, this film guides us into Ohm's own darkness so that we experience a catharsis along with him. No jokes, no grotesque style, just an earnest ghost story that's deadly serious.

Primetime (2026)

Score: 5 / 5

Easily a favorite film of the year for me -- yes, already -- Primetime is exactly what I needed to see to start spooky season. A dark comedy masquerading as a thriller with elements of stark psychological horror baked in, this piece of drama preys off our cultural obsession with true crime while implicating us as users of similarly-acting social media. You want to see the ugliness of human society? Lean in, and help us shame those we collectively have decided are worth shaming.

No matter how you felt about it, To Catch a Predator took our country by storm in the mid-2000s. Essentially a vigilante documentary crew worked in tandem with actors and, eventually, law enforcement to lure pedophiles from online chatrooms to a sting house, where they'd be caught on camera in the act of preparing to have sex with a supposed minor. Enter Chris Hansen, the perhaps overly dramatic host, who leads the almost-criminal in a dance with hard-hitting questions about "what was about to happen here" and "what you would have done had I not intervened." Publicly shamed and often taken into custody for investigation and questioning afterward, the evildoers of society were being stopped before they could harm a child. Naturally, debates about entrapment and of course the show's salacious and graphic essence made it quite controversial, even to this day. But it's hard to think of the show itself as being bad when it was doing so much good. Right?

Primetime dramatizes the ethics of the show far more than it dramatizes any historical events. Written by Ajon Singh, the screenplay is foremost a dual character study of actors and what they're willing to do to make their craft more real. Is what's real for an actor their motivation or their affect? The preparation or the performance? And what are we to do with the icky feeling of making undesirable people (who are arguably also just victims of society using the internet to mitigate their problematic desires) victims in their own right? At one point, a rabbi is caught and accused by Hansen, and he asks the host, "By what right do you do this?" While the film's protagonist is, of course, Hansen, we're also pushed into the perspective of the lure: two young actors (played wonderfully by Skyler Gisondo and Phoebe Bridgers) are brought in as improviso performers and trained to look, dress, sound, and act enough like an underage kid that they can get the perp to enter the sting house long enough to be caught on camera. But nobody really prepares them for the psychological trauma you'd experience being face-to-face with a predator who wants you in those crucial, horrifying moments before the gig is up. 

Much will be made of Robert Pattinson's performance in this movie as Chris Hansen, but I wanted to talk about those actor characters first both because their performances are no less transformative and brilliant but also because I had never considered their perspective before, despite having watched the show and its reruns. Those "lures," the bait, figured so briefly in the show -- and, surrounded as they were by crew and producers, they were surely very safe -- that I have never imagined what was going through their heads. How much was an intentional craft? We see Gisondo practicing for seemingly days, adjusting his voice in a higher register and meticulously shaving, using techniques from acting school; when, after his first episode airs, he asks his best friend about his performance, his friend basically says he was unnoticeable. Nobody watching the show cares about the intended victim. And that hit me hard because, well, neither did I. I don't think most of us did.

It's a similar approach to pseudo-reality as dramatized in May December, and actually this film has a similar tone and style. While we might agree with certain motivations or be able to empathize with certain feelings, none of these characters are clear-cut good or bad guys. If anything, they're all pretty bad, either enacting some kind of evil or reacting to some kind of evil in a way that also taints them. There's a line in John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt (and its excellent film adaptation, spoken by Meryl Streep's character Sister Aloysius) that reads, "When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in his service," and that feels relevant here. What would you do to stop a predator? Does he have to have committed a crime first? To what extent can you entrap someone intent on committing a crime? These are difficult questions to answer, especially when the moral center to your efforts is also one of livelihoods, earning money and recognition, and fame.

That's what's represented by the character of Hansen in this film. His sleazy, antiheroic presence drives the film as a vehicle for Pattinson's expertly calculated performance. Rising above the criticisms of his methods, Hansen and his equally ambitious producer Andie (a chillingly cynical Merritt Wever) push the show to be more hard-hitting and more spectacular, eager to succeed in their new spot in titular prime time, when most families in America are settling down to watch an episode of tv before bedtime. They're up against ABC's Lost, for cryin' out loud, as multiple characters parrot in excited and awed timbre. But, as we're treated to the "inside scoop" of several shoots, it becomes difficult to root for them -- despite their obviously good goals of stopping some of the worst (or potentially worst) people in society -- as we see their venal vendettas play out as ploys for ratings and studio privileges. Most of Pattinson's time on screen is of Hansen before a "performance," as he rehearses his idiosyncratic inflections and enunciative quirks, actively creating the character we all know in real life as Chris Hansen. 

Some will criticize this film for not being very realistic, of taking liberties with Hansen, maybe even of making him a bad guy (there is frank handling of his extramarital affairs in this film, though it never quite reaches fruition). But this isn't a biopic so much as it is a character study, and more of the persona and psychological profile of someone who might do what Hansen did. In Pattinson's work, Hansen becomes a vampiric firebrand, so sure that his work is righteous that he can take the time to develop himself personally and professionally, spending far too long rerecording the same voiceover narration for the show instead of researching a new case or moving on to the next sting. Rich cinematography by David Bolen (which deserves its own review... and awards) often captures close-ups on Hansen in the moments before he enters the room, a hungry gleam in his eye as he approaches the villain, eager to soak up his confusion, embarrassment, rage, indignation, self-pity, and remorse. Pattinson would give Bela Lugosi a run for his money.

The film does also bring up the obvious criticism that a show like this had the potential to drive someone -- who by any metric may not actually be a criminal and may be merely mentally disordered or ill -- to commit suicide, which of course did happen in 2006. That event signals the end of the film, leaving Hansen in a devastating (and devastated) awareness that his single-minded crusade had finally grown beyond his grasp and created deadly stakes with immediate effect. It's not dissimilar from Ahab's ill fate, and this climax comes on the telling verbalization that this particular sting was to catch "the whale," a codename indicating the biggest catch of the show's run, someone connected with upper government.

On top of all this high drama and thrilling, inspired-by-reality-you-remember resonance, the film also manages to tonally act not as hard-hitting investigative journalism nor as a historical treatise of entertainment but as a neo-Gothic opera. Thick stylizations in production design, lighting, sound and score, acting style, and of course cinematography make the viewing experience akin to Black Swan even as the plot, theme, and characters reminded me constantly of Nightcrawler. There's even a demonic figure who keeps appearing in Hansen's world, an apparent embodiment of ancient evil. The climax, during a violent thunderstorm, races to its bloody peak while ghostly memories flood Hansen's -- and our -- experience. 

And yet it's also chock-full of genuinely funny moments, from dry recitations of perverse transcripts of chats to unexpected and grotesque facial reactions and vocal tics from Pattinson. You might come to the film to get a glance behind the scenes into how To Catch a Predator moved to primetime (a la Saturday Night), but this isn't that. You might stay to enjoy Pattinson's masterful performance as a crazed, wicked man trying to merely be better than his targets. But I found boundless pleasure in its formal elements, too, and will be long haunted by its focus: not criminals, the law, or even really the entertainment, but on the human faces of vigilantism and the spiritual toll on actors doing something practical with their craft.

Digger (2026)

Score: 4.5 / 5

As he is wont to do, Alejandro G. Iñárritu graces us with an unexpected artistic tour de force this year, ushering us into awards season with panache. While the marketing for this film will have you believe it's a character study in an unconventional action flick to earn Tom Cruise accolades -- and don't misunderstand me, this performance will do just that -- this is no action movie. An icily incisive satire on capitalist governance and environmental culpability, Digger is a spiritual successor to Iñárritu's Birdman and something like a cross between a Wes Anderson comedy and a Yorgos Lanthimos film. 

Warning: it's not really possible to talk about this film without spoiling some aspect of it, so if you're worried about such things, stop reading now and go experience this amazing movie for yourself.

Digger Rockwell (the names in this screenplay are delightfully chosen) is a larger-than-life character played by Tom Cruise as a sort of Trumpian oil baron. His W. Bush-esque mannerisms allow him to act rather silly while being utterly captivating, a showman whose charisma and confidence bolstered by being the wealthiest man in any room allow him to act with impunity. We're introduced to him in his garishly opulent home, a mansion attended by servants, tending to his decrepit white cat (whose name, Maggie, and bejeweled costume invoke Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) who is clearly actively dying. Having fouled the bed she shares with Digger, she's then treated to a bath and more doting than a single living creature should ever have to endure. This opening scene feels perhaps more theatrical than it should, adding a heady mix of conversational drama to the otherwise borderline slapstick nature of its comedy.

Cruise disappears into the character, and for long stretches of the film I didn't think about his real-life persona at all. He's always been a gifted actor when allowed to do something like this -- I think of his performances in Lions for Lambs, for example, and of course Magnolia, among others -- but here he's mesmerizing. At once hilarious and disgusting, he injects moments of intimidation in interactions with other characters that make the deplorable character a bit scary. In many ways, the film is structured as a character study of him, and his arc is that of a tycoon meant to stop drilling for oil because of an impending crisis. It seems one of his rigs in the Arctic is expanding a crack in a glacier, causing an ice shelf five times the size of Washington, D.C., to crash into mainland Europe and cause catastrophic tsunamis. Millions of lives will be lost and -- more convincingly to the US cabinet -- trillions of dollars. 

In the film's second act (it's hard to know how to describe the distinct theatrical scenes in this film, as we will discuss presently), Digger is summoned to the White House, where he discusses the matter with officials. It's a room of self-serving white men (with an explicit nod to this within the dialogue) whose corrupt plans are less for the good of society than for their own benefit; instead of offering warnings to anyone, their first plan is to enact a firewall, allowing AI bots to censor and bury any keywords associated with the disaster online. The characters assembled -- including Riz Ahmed's mousy scientist and John Goodman's blowhard president with asshole cancer (literally) -- raise the energy of the film to an infectious fervor, more akin to a Coen brothers or McDonagh comedy than anything I expected here. And just when I thought things were heading in a clear and joyous direction, the film literally freezes and a tree that falls outside the White House window is revealed to be a miniature.

They're all on a stage, rehearsing a play; in the most jaw-dropping moment I've experienced in a film in years, the scene resets, with makeup artists hurrying on to touch up the actors, boom mics dropping into view, the scrim at back getting readjusted to better show the landscape projection of miniatures to create a lifelike backdrop. It's a Brechtian shift that I will not soon recover from. The director (Sophie Wilde of Talk to Me) enters to give notes to her stars during this, their final dress rehearsal. The play -- cleverly titled Fossil Fools -- is apparently a big-budget revival of the play on its 25th anniversary, meant as a satire on a real-life disaster that has since changed the world. Cruise, now revealed as actor Curtis playing Digger in the play, has a bizarre subplot of trying to locate his daughter flying on a plane through a hurricane, which indicates the real-life stakes of the "comedy" he's depicting on stage. How can we laugh at such existential horrors? Why are we simply making fun of the men responsible for the willful destruction of our world?

That largely seems the point of this film: how can and will art move forward and address things like the rise of fascism and late-stage capitalist corruption of Western society when (and if) we survive our current moment? The play is being produced by a mysterious young man (Jesse Plemons) who keeps floating around the stage and dressing rooms -- Digger's story is broken up by a few such interruptions of the "behind the scenes" resets that allow for jumps in time and location but not for any rest in the drama and comedy of this film -- eventually revealed as the real-life Digger Rockwell's nephew, who earnestly believes and expresses in his climactic speech to the cast and crew of Fossil Fools that people need a way to respond to tragedies and horrors of our past and that perhaps satire and theatre are a perfect means. It's a surprisingly uplifting moment (a la Charlie Kaufman in, for example, Synecdoche, New York) that inspires the production to push forward, even when (as the denouement reveals), the audience will need gas masks before they can go out onto the post-apocalyptic street after the bows.

This humanistic valorization of art is unexpected but sorely needed after the film's middle act -- its Shakespearean climax -- in which Digger addresses a sort of model Parliament/UN body of assembled heads of state. In a scene deserving of much screen time during awards ceremonies, Cruise as Curtis as Digger enters a room of powerful people knowing full well he is the most powerful among them. Fanned to an explosive fury by prior testimony about Digger's guilt and brazen disregard for the common good, they're prepared to effectively tar and feather him; their grayscale monochrome fury has the effect of seeming a Greek chorus. He's Mark Antony, about to paint himself as a hero and turn the crowd against Brutus again. He's Coriolanus, entering the court of public opinion and about to hand their asses to them on a spike. He delivers what must have been a ten-minute speech basically implicating the world (and us by extension) in his evil; we're too satisfied with living our unsustainable lives, he says, to do anything more than point fingers at him, the man actually doing something to make our lifestyle possible. It's damning, and truly hard to sit through.

And that's true for much of the film. I want to rewatch it with subtitles, because often the characters are shouting their lines over each other, desperate to be heard yet rarely with anything meaningful to say. These vapid, selfish monsters controlling our fate are ridiculous, and we are meant to laugh at their follies even as we recognize their clear parallels in our own world. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (a personal favorite) returns to work with Iñárritu with his typically brilliant work, shifting our focus from the gray malaise of the play-within-the-play to a marginally more colorful one in the theater, itself protected chromatically from the world beyond. Cosmo Sheldrake's score matches the timbre of the cast, often droning with deafening flourishes that feel operatic in small doses, like a sort of classical, sonic Tourette's. There's also a dose of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove here, both in comedic tone and meticulous approach to production design and uncanny surrealism. Digger won't be to everyone's taste, especially not those excited by the frankly misdirecting marketing, but if you're willing to get on its verbose and semi-surreal wavelength, it's a brilliant and haunting work of masterful filmmaking.

I dig it.

Verity (2026)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Synonymous with truth, verity dictates that I be honest about my feelings. I was crushed with disappointment by the time my screening of Verity ended last night. 

While Colleen Hoover has never held interest for me -- her novels, primarily immature romances, are not appealing, nor are the films based on them, despite starry casts -- I've been recommended her foray into mystery/thriller territory several times since its 2018 publication. So this past week, I tried reading it before this exciting new film released. Without meaning to yuck anyone's yum, it's simply not for me. Hoover's prose repeats itself ad nauseam, flirts with eroticism without actually containing any good sex, and rips shamelessly from better literature without twisting or adding anything of substance to the subgenera. In a rare move for me, I didn't even finish the book, and I'm better off for it. But I had hopes enough that the film would be diverting and entertaining, especially with its great cast.

Alas.

Paralyzed by a mysterious car accident, popular horror/thriller author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway, having an incredibly prolific year and clearly having a fun time with her insidious role in this film) is homebound at her remote, rural manse, cared for by a nursemaid and her attendant husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) and her sole surviving child, Crew. We learn that their other child, Crew's twin, had sometime previously been pulled from the lake behind their house, though the specifics are kept mum until much later. Her multi-million-dollar bibliography is unfinished, though, and her agent and fans alike are eager to capitalize on what's left of her creative power, though she's been rendered pathetically catatonic.

Enter Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson, in the wide-eyed ingenue with an axe to grind role she's mastered), a fairly average writer in a similar genre. She's our protagonist and entry point into the world of writing fiction: we meet her in a bookshop reading for her latest title, with all of five people in attendance, one quickly leaving when their phone interrupts the event. Walking somewhat dejectedly to a meeting with her agent, she is splattered in gore when a pedestrian is brutally slain by accident at an intersection. A perhaps too-nice man notices her shock and escorts her to a nearby bathroom to clean up, literally lending her the shirt off his back so she can make her meeting. Lo, and behold: he's Jeremy, the man who she and her agent indeed meet with shortly, and he wants her to finish his invalid wife's high-stakes series.

But the arrangement comes with strings, of course. He inexplicably won't gather Verity's notes and send them to the writer or an agent. Instead, he requires that Lowen come live with the Crawfords to go through the notes herself and, presumably, get a feel for Verity's life, style, and perspective. It's perhaps the first insult to the audience's sensibilities. Especially if you've seen any of the numerous attempts at re-dramatizing this basic yet oft-repeated plot, perhaps most recently in last year's The Housemaid, which I criticized some too in similar ways, yet ideas and images from which will remain in my mind for some time yet, to its credit.

Not only is it laughable that a man who seemingly has it all (and I found myself wondering what, exactly, it is he does for a living, since he's apparently the world's best dad and most attentive husband) can't make heads nor tails of some literary notes, but the whole premise is a blatant rip-off of other, more exciting stories in which a young female servant enters a domestic arrangement designed to undo her. Whether we're talking The Turn of the Screw or Jane Eyre, it's one of the oldest Gothic tropes in Western literature, complete with the incapacitated cuckquean wife trapped inside to witness (spoiler, I guess, if you've never read a novel) her abusive husband's latest conquest. Hell, this even steals from Rebecca, with Lowen regularly imagining Verity speaking to her in ghostly voiceover, narrating her stories and the secrets of her life in tandem.

By film's end, nothing comes of this genre-bound exercise. I counted no fewer than three revelatory twists -- Verity's memoir as fictional, Verity's faking of paralysis, and Jeremy's revenge -- all of which we see coming a mile off. Sure, I figured more than once that Jeremy himself had penned her dubious, casually confessional memoir (which Lowen discovers on a flash drive in a box of cigs and sets up a parallel plot in which Verity's romance and motherhood are dramatized), but the ridiculous idea that it was a psychological tool meant to help her fiction by getting into the mind of her signature protagonists (apparently exclusively homicidal femme fatales) is so outrageous, it feels almost intentionally harmful and targeted at art therapists. That she's faking it is hinted at multiple times, including early moments where Lowen sees Verity walking around the house, but that's she's apparently convinced everyone else (including a husband who literally tried to kill her and cover it up) for so long is impossible. At one point, I was sure the nurse had to be in on her performance, but nothing is made of that, and that character is utterly wasted. And by the time Jeremy fakes his own shock and surprise at learning of Verity's false written confession and suffocates his pleading wife, I was frankly embarrassed at having come to see this movie.

Instead of leaning into interesting conversations at such moments of heightened melodrama, the film suggests its ideas and then forces action to derail us. It's never clear exactly what Verity's plan was or why she wouldn't immediately try to get help out of her situation from the several people with private access to her.: the nurse, her son (though apparently he knows she's at least partly functional and they play together), Lowen herself, or even Verity's own agent, the moron who suggested she create a false autobiography in front of her husband. Johnson plays her well, but the character is unbearably fatuous to read (hence my DNF choice) and somehow the film pulls off the same effect, even without her actual narration. It's never clear what Lowen wants, either: she lounges around the house for days, helping herself to copious coffee and booze, creepily trying to get Crew to like her, spying on the resident invalid and her hunky husband, but the only work we actually see her doing is laying out a few dozen index cards (apparently Verity's notes on the series, so crisp, clean, and well-organized that a kid could have gone through it all faster) and lying down between them. She snoops and discovers Verity's memoir, it's true, but then she spends days reading it. I'm sorry, but this isn't just an interesting bit of free-time reading, girlfriend; it is literally your job right now to get inside the mind of the woman for whom you are ghostwriting. Make haste! And stop fretting that the husband isn't paying you more attention.

And don't even get me started on the ending, when, (again, spoiler, I guess?) Jeremy and Lowen, now pregnant, move out of Verity's house yet not before Lowen discovers a handwritten letter from Verity that is so nonsensical as to have completely taken me out of the viewing experience. Thus, Lowen knows she's doomed herself to Verity's own fate. But I already hated Lowen, so her fate felt grimly satisfying to me.

Which brings us to what might have been my final straw: the "erotic" romance of this just doesn't work, unless you accept that they're all just terrible people. Especially Lowen. Once she finally decides to try and prove her host is faking her condition, a memorable scene has Lowen use a thumb tack to viciously stab Verity, insulting her and gloating about how she's taking Jeremy right under Verity's baleful gaze. Lowen is a monster, a parasite eager to suck up the things Verity has earned but that Lowen has only ever wished for. Including her husband, who is painted in such broad strokes as to be more of a caricature than a character, and I mean that in the screenplay, not as Hartnett capably plays him (always with that earnest, golden retriever energy calculatedly disguising an edge). It was he, we learn, not Verity, who had read Lowen's one successful previous title; he, not Verity, who liked her voice. He who had read Verity's fictional tale of murdering their child and chose to stage her suicide rather than, I don't know, talk to her about it or report it to the authorities. So by the time he and Lowen consummate their smut-coded yet disappointingly flaccid chemistry, I was just annoyed at everyone's annoying habit of making the stupidest choice available to them in any given moment.

If you like a basic story and want pretty things to look at, you could do worse than turning this on while working on a puzzle. The actors are all wonderful and add surprising and satisfying layers to their respective characters, especially Hathaway giving camp, doing a sort of upper class matron with sultry inflection. Gorgeous production design in costumes and the house seem to vibrate in some scenes, captured by warm light and some nicely balanced cinematography. The film draws us into its visual pleasures in all the ways the screenplay doesn't, and while Verity is far tamer and more prudish in practice than the erotic thriller of the late '80s/'90s it desperately wants to be, I'd still call it a sensual thriller for its alluring tactility. Its themes of truth and lies, fiction and reality, and obsession and control should have offered fertile ground for inventive, transgressive storytelling, but instead the pleasures of this source material stop there, forcing the filmmakers to, thankfully, improve at least the viewing experience if nothing else. I just wish someone in the creative team also improved what doesn't work about the source material.

And that's the truth.