LOST SOULS
Rated R - Running Time: 1:37 - Released 10/13/00
Every Halloween brings its share of spooky-ooky-ooky releases,
and this year's current entry is Janusz Kaminski's Lost Souls,
the first directorial effort for the long-time Spielberg cinematographer.
Although Kaminski's art can be seen in such masterpieces as Schindler's
List, Saving Private Ryan,
and Amistad, the directing talent
of his influential pal has apparently not rubbed off. Written
by Pierce Gardner and Betsy Stahl (first outing for them, too),
Lost Souls is a mangled mess of Catholic idolatry and boogie-man
mumbo-jumbo — boring, uneventful, and primarily stupid. Apparently,
this film was completed over a year ago but its release was held
back to avoid unfavorable comparison with last year's similar
Catholic-themed films Stigmata
and End Of Days. It didn't
help. While neither of those films was anything to write home
about, this one should require its producers to go to confession.
Kaminski tries to use some jittery camera work to keep us awake,
but the Gardner/Stahl script and the phoned in performances of
Winona Ryder and Ben Chaplin make it a first class yawn fest and
a tragic waste of time and celluloid. Even a cameo by John Hurt
fails to make this film worthwhile.
Lost Souls takes an obscure passage from Deuteronomy
and tries desperately to make something of it: at the film's opening,
we see the words, "A man born of incest will become Satan
and the world will be no more." Next we witness a failed
exorcism which is attempted on a convicted killer thought to be
possessed. But although psychopath Bergson (John Diehl) is not
the devil in disguise, he seems to know who is. Through a numerical
code he constantly scribbles down, he communicates to former possessee
Maya Larkin (Ryder) that the Beast is hiding in the body of one
Peter Kelson (Chaplin), an author who studies the psychology of
killers and who does not believe that evil, per se, exists. He
believes instead in a condition he calls "malignant narcissism,"
which is never properly explained, but which apparently causes
people's evil behavior without the need for any Dark Lord of the
Underworld to control them.
So Maya goes to the famed author and explains to him that not
only does the devil exist, but it's him. He is not amused.
Lost Souls has no redeeming qualities. I have never seen Winona Ryder so indifferent to a role; it's as if she had to do this film in order to fulfill a court-ordered agreement, like community service. Maybe she got caught smoking doobie on the set of Alien Resurrection. Meanwhile, Chaplin has the emotional depth of a French poodle. He can't seem to manage anything but a look of confusion, perhaps because he's baffled at how his career has progressed from The Remains Of The Day to The Thin Red Line to this. The story is dreadfully boring; it is a full hour into the film before anything remotely interesting happens and the ending is no less than idiotic. Director Kaminski shows his cinematographic roots by utilizing color desaturation and a couple of different film stocks, not to mention handheld cameras, dark, brooding sets, and pretentious camera angles. But it's all just a show of technical knowhow with no . . . well, soul. *