Lost Souls is the type of movie that seems to have quite a bit going for it from the very beginning: an Academy Award-winning director, a good cast of actors, and an adequate screenplay. But by the time it comes to the conclusion of the film, all of those positive aspects have been forgotten. The horribly anticlimactic resolution of the plot has shoved those good points aside and left us wondering why we liked it in the beginning.
The movie’s plot revolves around Maya Larkin (Winona Ryder), a young woman who was possessed by demons in her youth. Now she works with the priest (John Hurt) who exorcised her years ago, doing the same in the first minutes of the movie for a convicted serial killer. Through this exorcism, Maya discovers that the Devil will soon be manifesting himself on Earth by possessing a crime novelist named Peter Kelson (Ben Chaplin). She and Peter eventually must work together to try to save his life, and the lives of the entire human race, by stopping the Devil’s plans from coming to fruition.
The director of Lost Souls, Janusz Kaminski, has worked with Spielberg as the cinematographer on his last four films, winning Academy Awards for two of them, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. His prowess at capturing images that tell the story more powerfully than the actual dialogue is evident here. He manages to keep us on the edge of our seats throughout the film by transcending the sometimes cliched story and establishing a frightening mood through diverse techniques. He films scenes at odd, askew angles to add to the tension, and the film stock itself seems to have been given a yellow or green tint in various scenes to add to the strange feelings in the air.
Through these techniques, Kaminski builds the tension slowly. He takes a courageous leap as a director in the beginning of the film and allows some of the early scenes leading up to the initial exorcism to occur in almost total silence, without any explanation of who some of these characters are. This technique might have worked against him, had audiences become bored by the slow-moving nature of the film in the beginning. But by Kaminski using this method, the film avoids exposition, trusting the audience is smart enough to use their imaginations and fill in some of the blanks on their own, even if we must be patient and wait for more pieces of the puzzle to be revealed for it all to finally become clear and make sense.
Kaminski also trusts his actors enough to allow them to develop their characters more through their actions, rather than providing long detailed flashbacks that explain their motivations. We only get about thirty seconds of flashback to inform us of Maya’s own firsthand knowledge of exorcisms, but it’s enough. Winona Ryder does a good job of developing her character as one who still carries the demons that once possessed her (haunting her through some very frightening hallucinations). She creates Maya’s character as a very strong and intelligent young woman who is striving to save the world at the same time as she fights against her own personal problems. The nature of Peter’s initial skepticism of Maya is easy to understand; his life as an admired criminal analyst and writer tells him there must be a commonplace explanation for these events. But underneath the skepticism, Ben Chaplin allows Kelson’s fear to shine through gradually as more and more events occur that defy his sense of logic.
But then there’s that horrible, horrible final two minutes of the film, which comes along and spoils everything that came before. It is such a letdown that we leave the theater disoriented and even a little angry that we might have wasted our time by watching this film. Not only that, but this sour note of an final scene so upends the audience’s expectations that we can’t help but look back at the film and find more flaws in it through deeper analysis. There are entire subplots, including one about a trial that Kelson is researching for his next book, that we were made to think were important but in the end are left unresolved. Several supporting actors, John Hurt especially, are given very little to do other than stand around and occasionally interject. Alfre Woodard’s appearance as a psychiatrist is so slight that her name doesn’t even appear in the credits. This conclusion, which seems entirely arbitrary and tacked onto the film, leaves the audience wondering why any of the film’s action took place and completely ruins the film.
I don’t fault Kaminski, Ryder or Chaplin for the film’s failure. They all performed their tasks admirably. But the film was allowed to sit on the studio shelf for over a year, to avoid the film being released in the glut of “end-of-the-world” horror flicks that appeared last year, bad movies like The Ninth Gate and End of Days. It is rumored that, while the movie sat on the shelf, some studio execs took it back to the editing room, and that they might be to blame for the film’s disastrous conclusion. Whatever the cause, my hope is that, whenever the film is released on video and DVD, we are treated to a much superior director’s cut of Lost Souls. The current version playing in theaters leaves quite a bit to be desired.
