Lost Souls

Directed by Janusz Kaminski, Lost Souls follows Winona Ryder’s Maya Larkin as she attempts to help a controversial journalist (Ben Chaplin’s Peter Kelson) defend himself against Satanic worshippers. Filmmaker Kaminski, making his debut here, delivers a progressively tiresome thriller that gets off to an especially underwhelming start, as the movie, written by Pierce Gardner, kicks off with an exceedingly (and excessively) deliberate opening stretch that contains little in the way of an entry point for the viewer – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated by Mauro Fiore’s grainy, distracting visuals and a charmless central performance by Chaplin. There’s little doubt, too, that the movie’s proliferation of mysterious elements contributes heavily to its seriously lackluster atmosphere, as Kaminski’s refusal to initially spell out exactly what’s going on lends the proceedings a distinct let’s-get-on-with-it-already type of feel (ie it’s not until almost an hour in that the threat (and the point of all this) is finally made clear). And while the picture admittedly does contain a very small handful of genuinely compelling sequences, including (and especially) a sequence wherein Peter plays a tape of an exorcism that only his neighbor can hear, Lost Souls builds towards an extraordinarily tedious third act that ensures it fizzles out long before arriving at its anticlimactic finale – with the movie’s failure especially disappointing given the narrative’s kernel of potential (ie in different, better hands, this could’ve been an intriguing spin on a certain subgenre of horror film).

*1/2 out of ****