Friday, February 25, 2011

Brad Anderson is a director stuck in the limbo between straight-up, no-holds barred genre film-making and a headier, more "serious" type of film. A glance at his filmography clearly paints the picture of a man grown up on Hitchcockian thrillers and brainy horror flicks, and the films he creates echo these influences. Transsiberian is a classic man-out-place thriller, The Machinist an almost Twilight Zone-like episode, Session 9 a haunted asylum scarefest - the sandbox Anderson plays in is decidedly genre. Yet, the way he crafts that sand leans heavily on infusing the traditional genre fare with an ooey-gooey emotional heart. It is nice to see genre fare treated with a bigger emphasis on character building, but Vanishing On 7th Street, Anderson’s new film, can’t find an adequate balance between a larger-than-life horror story and his character’s emotional back story, resulting in a film undercooked and cloying.

Review - Vanishing On 7th Street

A worldwide blackout occurs that leaves four people nearly alone surrounded by the remnants of the world’s civilization. People have literally disappeared where they stood, empty piles of clothing the only evidence they ever existed. Even worse, the dark itself seems to be the perpetrator of the disappearances. The quartet of survivors - a hotshot TV anchor (Hayden Christiansen), a religious mom searching for her son (Thandie Newton), a kid (Jacob Latimore), and a geeky projectionist (John Leguizamo) - end up at a bar (on 7th Street) and try and figure out how to survive.

Anderson’s biggest fault in making this film is that he never clearly identifies the rules of what happened and how these people are going to survive. All he posits is that if you get caught in the dark, you disappear. He never states if your gone for good (Leguizamo’s character Paul, seems to be taken, but then returns) or if your gone at all, only that the dark, the shadows even, are possible captors and to avoid them at all costs. This oversight makes the film feel sloppy and underdeveloped, the survivors are scared but there’s no boundaries for their fears and it deludes the scares in the film. The time Anderson could’ve spent developing his world, he instead fills with saccharine flashbacks to the character’s lives prior to the blackout. He attempts to flesh out his characters with these look backs, to make them viable emotional creatures. Anderson can’t figure out what he wants to do most - make a film about creepy shadow monsters or a film about the characters emotional well-being. Most of the time, before we can even think to care about their back stories, they’ve been enveloped by the shadows.

What the film ends up being is a lot of literal running from shadows, roughly broken up by frantic exposition and crying. The fear of the dark and the memories that haunt us is a classic bit of horror lore, I just wish Anderson had seen it as such, a horror film.

- Noah Sanders -



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