Mothman Prophecies, The (2002)
Mothman Prophecies, The (2002), directed by Mark Pellington.
I think there is something the movies often get right. When faced with the uncanny or inexplicable or supernatural: just let it go. If the quick exercise of skeptical reason does not readily suggest an explanation, don't torture yourself with an obsessive quest for the truth. That way madness lies.
We have no way of knowing into what strange realms reality extends, and have no reason to suppose our minds can encompass all of it. At best we fool ourselves into believing we understand when we do not. At worst we bend our minds into painful, dysfunctional, damned channels.
Far better to say "Well, it's a mystery".
This is a spooky film, but not really a horror story. It is something like Robert Anton Wilson meets David Lynch meets The X-Files. Darker and more serious than The X-Files, it reminds me of another of Chris Carter's series: Millennium (1989).
Thinking of dimensions or realities beyond the ones we know always suggests demonology: "You noticed them and they became aware of you".
Filled with ominous music and photographed with paranoia-inducing demon-angles.
Richard Gere is immersed in the role of a journalist who -- like Fox Mulder -- has suffered loss and experiences missing time when he finds himself in a strange town where all sorts of weird things happen, he being one of those things. His grief is the engine powering the whole story.
Laura Linney is quite good as his Scully, here a police deputy. Will Patton is a mentally fragile, susceptible local.
Alan Bates is the reclusive authority on extra-dimensional beings. He is the same sort of disreputable British scientist that Peter O'Toole provided in Phantoms (1998).
Bates gives a wise observation when explaining why we can't get to the bottom of the mysteries: "We are not allowed to know".
Notes:
Has our hero been lured to the town? The very first scene has a phone squeal, a sign of "them", but isn't this long before he noticed them and they became aware of him?
No UFOs here, but it suggests something much like the Interdimensional UFO hypothesis.
Based on a book by John Keel which I remember reading when it was new. I went through a ton of paranormal material when I was young, making me skeptically immune to it since. The bridge collapse in 1967 was a real event; whether people were seeing strange things before that, I do not know. Point Pleasant WV does have a Mothman Museum and Mothman Festival.
The scenes of the bridge disaster are really well done: a combination of miniatures, effects and direct photography.
I suppose audiences were dissatisfied. No explanation, our people outmatched, no way of taking the fight to "them".
I have an explanation for the story I don't suppose the filmmakers intended. It does not require extra-dimensional beings if we are willing to accept a degree of precognition, human consciousness operating through time.
Prominent on the night of the bridge collapse were two red lights on the bridge towers. The trauma of the catastrophe caused enough psychic disturbance to project the image of two red eyes into the past, along with much other unsettling weirdness. The red eyes are a prominent motif of the film (and Mothman himself, it seems).
"Indrid Cold" says "Do not be afraid". That's the first thing angels say in the Bible, which must mean they are terrifying to meet.
There is a tiny genre of the autumnally-toned horror film. The Millennium (1989) TV series is one, Denzel Washington's Fallen (1998) is another, and I think this one belongs, too.
Photographed by Fred Murphy -- The State of Things (1982), Q (1982), The Dead (1987).
Effectively creepifying score by Tomandandy.
The only Blu-rays for this are imports. The Australian Imprint disc has better color and texture than the German version I saw and retains the director's commentary:
He put in a lot of time on the sound and visual designs.
Some of those details went past me while watching, but maybe they have a subliminal or cumulative effect.
He praises the actors, describing how much he learned from them.
