Sometimes driving late at night, you lose track of where you are. Call it exhaustion; call it “highway hypnosis.” At some point, you realize you’ve been driving on automatic. Washington Post reporter John Klein (Richard Gere) experiences it, finding himself in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when he’d meant to drive to Charleston. Weirder still, during his trance he has traveled 400 miles in an hour and a half.
After his car breaks down at the end of this speedy journey, Klein walks over to a local farmhouse. The owner, Gordon (Will Patton), pulls a gun on him, angry that this makes the third night in a row that Klein has come to the door at 2:30 in the morning. Yes, Klein has fallen into the twilight zone, as he discovers the whole town is falling victim to The Mothman Prophecies.
For Klein, it actually started two years earlier, when his wife Mary (Debra Messing, blessedly free of any Grace) crashes their car trying to avoid a grey, red-eyed thing in the road. Klein is unhurt and unaware of the cause, but the accident reveals that Mary had an inoperable brain tumor. Her last days get spent in terror, though a hospital orderly mistakes her mad drawings to be angels.
Teaming with a local police officer (Laura Linney), Klein finds a connection between his wife’s sketchbook and a creature terrorizing the people of Point Pleasant. When it starts giving warnings of impending disasters to Gordon, well, almost everyone’s sanity becomes in doubt.
Loosely based on true events (but not as loosely as most Hollywood historical movies in the last couple of years), the film takes a cold, almost aloof approach to the goings on. We should be free to be cynics watching this, as coincidences pile on top of each other, and everyday objects take on ominous leanings. Klein becomes convinced that almost everything happening around him holds meaning, and at first, it’s funny. Then without warning, it becomes just as hard for the viewer to separate the random occurrences from those with portent.
Eventually, the most unbelievable part of the movie is that it takes Klein several days of experiencing these phenomena before he starts drinking.
Director Mark Pellington has done something pretty surprising, making a movie suffused with dread. He refuses to make it easy for us to make up our minds one way or the other; the two or three glimpses of the Mothman are purposely vague, and almost always seen in subjective flashback. (The exception is John and Mary’s accident, but still, it could have been an owl. A man-sized owl.)
Otherwise, things lurk maddeningly just at the edge of our vision, either out of focus or darting away just as we notice. The camera often looks down at the characters, then swoops over them, making it clear that these people are being watched by something. That something also has a disturbing tendency to watch from behind television screens and the other side of mirrors. And even though it calls itself “Indrid Cold,” we never really get to understand what it is.
That ambivalence marks both the strength and the weakness of The Mothman Prophecies. To soothe us, the script introduces a paranormal expert, Alexander Leek (Alan Bates). But the part offers no satisfaction, and really just slows things down. Leek provides Klein with explanation after explanation that isn’t an explanation, except to say that he, too, has had contact with the Mothman. (Or Mothmen. The script varies in its description.)
Was it a hoaxter? UFOs (residents reported visits from Men In Black, but for obvious copyright confusion reasons, Sony has omitted them from this story)? Something cryptozoological? Ultimately, no one knows. And the movie would be stronger if it didn’t try to convince us that there is an answer it just won’t tell us.
At their best, Pellington and screenwriter Richard Hatem trust that our imaginations will do a lot of their work for them. When they give over to that trust, the movie works beautifully. Even the couple of cheap scares thrown in work, because what actually pops up is completely unexpected.
Though they’ve moved the events forward to modern day (Point Pleasant was actually terrorized in the mid-’60’s), and obviously fictionalized some characters, you may be more disturbed by how much the filmmakers didn’t exaggerate. The movie’s website has a lot of information. Lest you write it off as studio hype, a quick search around the web will corroborate a lot of the stories. Radio host Art Bell should have a field day with this stuff. And indeed, John A. Keel (the real “Klein”) guested on Bell’s show just last night. Somehow, ironically, this was the first time Bell had heard of the Mothman.
But it won’t be the last.
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