The Assault

IMDb
Sam Gleason arrives in a new town where high school football is the backbone of the community. When she accuses a member of the team of committing heinous acts against her on a night she can't even remember, will anyone believe her?



Crushable

One look at the new Lifetime movie The Assault – about a cheerleader raped by members of the football team while drunk, and the subsequent social media documentation and cover-up — and it’s clear that it was based on the recent Steubenville rape case. “Ripped from the headlines” movies always make me nervous, because the result is often an exploitative and disrespectful attempt to get ratings, rather than a compassionate account of a serious story and/or a call to action to change things. In this movie’s case, I felt like a compassionate account was hidden in there somewhere (parts of it did pull me in and get me emotional), but unfortunately they were covered up by layer after layer of cliche and coincidence and convenience.

Needless to say when you’re dealing with a Lifetime movie, this account of the story adds and/or changes a lot of details when it really shouldn’t have had to. The true story is already pretty dramatic and compelling, and it opened up an important dialogue about rape culture. It offers a lot for the movie to examine, but unfortunately it ignored that in favor of silly plotlines. It’s key with these types of movies that things feel believable, like they could actually happen in real life, because they dohappen in real life, and viewers need to understand that. Unfortunately Lifetime’s portrayal made it feel less like an account of a real issue and more like a fantasy.

1. The movie starts with the victim (Sam) dramatically lighting herself on fire at a football game.

The film clearly wants viewers to know what a traumatic experience being raped was for this girl, and apparently the only way to get that across is to have her publicly attempt suicide in the most dramatic way possible. Subtlety is not in Lifetime’s vocabulary, after all.

2. Sam also recently lost her mother.

I know Lifetime lives for giving their characters past trauma to deal with, but isn’t a rape trauma enough? In this case, our heroine doesn’t need a dead mother for us to feel for her. The whole premise of this movie already does that.

3. The detective investigating the case is the football coach’s sister.

They also have a strained relationship, and she just recently moved to his town. Really? REALLY?

4. The detective also recently lost her mother.

Apparently in order for her and Sam to relate to each other and come to an understanding, they have to bond over a very specific shared life experience. Oh, but wait until you hear the next item on our list.

5. The detective was also raped while intoxicated.

That’s right. As we all know, Lifetime movie detectives can never work on a case that isn’t incredibly personal to them. So obviously her football coach brother has to tell her that locking up his players won’t change what happened to her, adding that they “were all drunk” that night. One day Lifetime will grasp the concept that sympathy doesn’t require identical life experience, but I guess they’re not there yet.

6. Sam’s former BFF returns to her life to help her piece together the details of that night.

It’s always “We used to be best friends, but then you got popular and you haven’t talked to me in five years, but now this tragedy has brought us back together.” It’s been done approximately 15 million times before. It’s just annoying now.

7. Sam broke up with her boyfriend the night of the rape, and he witnessed the aftermath but didn’t say anything.

Because in addition to losing her mom, being raped, and attempting suicide, let’s add some heartbreak and betrayal.

8. The case is tied up neatly thanks to an extremely incriminating video.

The football coach had initially released a video that made it look like Sam had asked the players to have sex with her. But when the full video gets released, it turns out it was edited, and Sam is clearly screaming “No” and “This isn’t what I want.” Unfortunately, the real case wasn’t so simple; the victim was deemed too incapacitated to give consent. But this movie ignores that in favor of a cut-and-dry, let’s-wrap-this-up approach, which unfortunately sends the message that rape is always as black and white as that, which it isn’t — as was shown by the case that inspired this whole movie. Do you see the problem?

9. The movie ends with an “Oh captain, my captain!” scene.

Apparently things still weren’t dramatic enough, so after the rapists have been brought to justice, the movie ends with Sam standing on the football field while her BFF plays the recording of her rape on the loudspeakers. Everyone is very emotional, some of the players remove their helmets, her father holds her hand, the people in the bleachers stand up in solidarity with her, etc.

If you peeled away all of these cliches and attempts to make an already extremely dramatic and affecting story even more dramatic and affecting, there might have been a compelling and compassionate movie under there. But unfortunately it would only be like fifteen minutes long.

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The X Files: I Want to Believe

IMDb
Mulder and Scully are called back to duty by the FBI when a former priest claims to be receiving psychic visions pertaining to a kidnapped agent.


RogerEbert

"The X-Files: I Want to Believe" arrives billed as a "stand-alone" film that requires no familiarity with the famous television series. So it is, leaving us to piece together the plot on our own. And when I say "piece together," trust me, that's exactly what I mean. In an early scene, a human arm turns up, missing its body, and other spare parts are later discovered.

The arm is found in a virtuoso scene showing dozens of FBI agents lined up and marching across a field of frozen snow. They are led by a white-haired, entranced old man who suddenly drops to his knees and cries out that this is the place! And it is.

Now allow me to jump ahead and drag in the former agents Mulder and Scully. Mulder (David Duchovny) has left the FBI under a cloud because of his belief in the paranormal. Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a top-level surgeon, recruited to bring Mulder in from the cold, all his sins forgiven, to help on an urgent case. An agent is missing, and the white-haired man, we learn, is Father Joe (Billy Connolly), a convicted pedophile, who is said to be a psychic.

Scully brings in Mulder, but detests the old priest's crimes and thinks he is a fraud. Mulder, of course, wants to believe Father Joe could help on the case. But hold on one second. Even assuming that Father Joe planted the severed arm himself, you'll have to admit it's astonishing that he can lead agents to its exact resting place in a snow-covered terrain the size of several football fields, with no landmarks. Even before he started weeping blood instead of tears, I believed him. Scully keeps right on insulting him right to his face. She wants not to believe.

Scully is emotionally involved in the case of a young boy who will certainly die if he doesn't have a risky experimental bone marrow treatment. This case, interesting in itself, is irrelevant to the rest of the plot except that it inspires a Google search that offers a fateful clue. Apart from that, what we're faced with is a series of victims, including Agent Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet) and eventually Mulder himself, who are run off the road by a weirdo with a snowplow.

Who is doing this? And why does Father Joe keep getting psychic signals of barking dogs? And is the missing agent still alive, as he thinks she is? And won't anyone listen to Mulder, who eventually finds himself all alone in the middle of a blizzard, being run off the road, and then approaching a suspicious building complex after losing his cell phone? And how does he deal with a barking dog?

I make it sound a little silly. Well, it is a little silly, but it's also a skillful thriller, giving us just enough cutaways to a sinister laboratory to keep us fascinated. What happens in this laboratory you will have to find out for yourself, but the solution may be more complex than you think if you only watch casually. Hint: Pay close attention to the hands.

What I appreciated about "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" was that it involved actual questions of morality, just as "The Dark Knight" does. It's not simply about good and evil but about choices. Come to think of it, Scully's dying child may be connected to the plot in another way, since it poses the question: Are any means justified to keep a dying person alive?

The movie lacks a single explosion. It has firearms, but nobody is shot. The special effects would have been possible in the era of "Frankenstein." Lots of stunt people were used. I had the sensation of looking at real people in real spaces, not motion-capture in CGI spaces. There was a tangible quality to the film that made the suspense more effective because it involved the physical world.

Of course, it involves a psychic world, too. And the veteran Scottish actor Billy Connolly creates a quiet, understated performance as a man who hates himself for his sins, makes no great claims, does not understand his psychic powers, is only trying to help. He wants to believe he can be forgiven. As for Duchovny and Anderson, these roles are their own. It's like they're in repertory. They still love each other, and still believe they would never work as a couple.

Or should I say they want to believe?

The movie is insidious. It involves evil on not one level but two. The evildoers, it must be said, are singularly inept; they receive bills for medical supplies under their own names, and surely there must be more efficient ways to abduct victims and purchase animal tranquilizers. But what they're up to is so creepy, and the snow-covered Virginia landscapes so haunting, and the wrong-headedness of Scully so frustrating, and the FBI bureaucracy so stupid, and Mulder so brave, that the movie works like thrillers used to work, before they were required to contain villains the size of buildings.

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Another Me

IMDb
A teenager finds her perfect life upended when she's stalked by a mysterious doppelganger who has her eyes set on assuming her identity.


HollyWood Reporter

Based on a novel by Scottish writer Cathy MacPhail, Another Me tells the story of an insecure youth from the Cardiff projects who has to deal with a father with multiple sclerosis, a two-timing mother, a drama teacher played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, a Doppelgänger that might be her understudy (or is it vice versa?) in the school play, as well as misty underpasses, spontaneously cracking windows and a whole lot of other supposedly scary-spooky stuff about which one would want to quote Colin Firth’s character in Love Actually: “It’s mainly scary how bad the writing is." Justin Bieber's lyrics on his G-rated first album are creepier than this stone-cold mess.

PHOTOS: Emmys: Best and Worst Moments From the Show

What this film’s business was in competition at the recent Rome Film Festival is anyone’s guess (perhaps there's a Doppelgänger movie out there that's actually good?). Even the involvement ofGame of Thrones starlet Sophie Turner in the lead and an impressive series of name actors in badly conceived supporting roles, including Rhys Ifans, Leonor Watling and Geraldine Chaplin, will make this a difficult sell beyond anything but undiscriminating TV channels looking for English-language filler.

Unconfident teenager Fay (Turner) is somewhat surprisingly offered the role of Lady Macbeth at school. The handsome Drew (Gregg Sulkin, as reliably squeaky-clean as his recurrent roles in Disney Channel-projects suggest) is cast opposite her in the lead, though clearly such a nice, handsome and eccentrically non-threatening guy couldn’t be interested in a wallflower like her? Meanwhile, mean girl Monica (Spanish actress Charlotte Vega) has been cast as Fay’s understudy and has the nasty habit of copying her hairdo -- the epitome of all adolescent evil.   

At home, things aren’t much better, as Dad (Ifans, the only actual Welshman in the cast) suffers from MS and Mom’s (Forlani) idea of sticking by her man through sickness and health is to have an extramarital affair with someone Fay knows. To top it all off, an eerie old neighbor (Chaplin) sees her going up and down the stairs when Fay knows she’s been taking the elevator and her classmates saw her at school even on the day she was sick and staid at home. Evidently, her life is a mess and something -- or someone -- is messing with Fay’s head.

Though Coixet has always had a strong visual sense and her regular cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu knows how to make things look pretty, there is a clear sense here that Coixet is completely out of her depth in this genre exercise, which is all excessive surfaces and no tension, however hard the music and sound effects try to tell audiences otherwise.

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The problems and dilemmas of any one of the members of the large cast could have made a potentially decent Coixet movie -- she's always at her best when uncovering her characters’ psychology, as in The Secret Life of Words and the Philip Roth adaptation Elegy -- but the general impression here is that she’s too busy setting up the next red herring and simultaneously keeping all the narrative balls in the air to be able to dig very deep psychologically. The director, who also wrote the screenplay, doesn’t allow herself enough time to develop her protagonist into someone singular and interesting before she starts getting the impression there's possibly more than one of her, and Turner, though a stunner to look at, is as bland as the character must have been on the page.

Editors Peter Lambert and Elena Ruiz also seem clueless about how different scenes should fit together to create meaning, at one point cross-cutting between a devastating hospital visit of Fay’s parents and a make-out session with Fay at home to no apparent benefit for either storyline other than suggesting that these must have occurred at the same time. Perhaps Coixet is crudely juxtaposing sex and death because that’s what psychothrillers do? Really? If so: Groundbreaking. Also: So what?

The most shocking revelation of the film however, isn’t the identity of Fay’s evil twin at all -- revealed through some shockingly convenient contrivances that would even have Robert McKee and the lateSyd Field reach for their red markers -- but rather the realization that these 90 minutes were an utterly pointless waste of talent both in front and behind of the cameras.

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Across the River

IMDb
The story revolves around an ethologist working in the remote woods, trapping animals and mounting cameras on them so that he can monitor their behavior remotely. The resulting recordings lead him to a remote village, the site of an ancient curse, where he is trapped due to heavy rain fall raising the level of the river and flooding out the only access...



The Nightmare Gallery

Movie review: Across the River [2013]

Ethologist Marco Contrada (played by Marco Marchese) prowls the wilderness near the Italian/Slovenian border, living out f a caravan. Here he conducts his regular wildlife survey, which includes trapping animals and strapping cameras onto them, to track their nocturnal behavior. What he finds disturbs him: something stalks these remote woods, savaging foxes and wild pigs, something that hasn’t shown up on his camera footage.

His research takes him across a shallow river to the crumbling remains of a deserted village. Soon enough, Marco finds the source of the animal killings: two diminutive, figures who show up on his night-vision footage.

Marco has no idea what happened in this village, decades ago. He doesn’t know that two little girls lived here during the second World War. He doesn’t know that the girls’ neighbors feared them and whispered rumors of witchcraft. He doesn’t know what happened to the girls when the soldiers came, or why they laid a curse on the village.

All he knows is that when heavy rains fall and the river floods, he is trapped here…with the savage, spectral creatures who slaughter the local wildlife.

The above synopsis of Across the River probably gives the impression that it’s a standard, run-of-the-mill horror picture. A movie, with found-footage elements, about a researcher stranded in a remote European wilderness, where decades before a terrifying atrocity occurred, and a supernatural force still roamed? Gee, I think it’s been two days since I’ve seen one of those. The difference between Across the River and a thousand other similar films proves Roger Ebert’s familiar rule: a movie is not so much about what it’s about, but how it’s about it.

To start us off, the film has very little plot. Marco Contrada is the only major character, and he never interacts with any of the other characters. He occasionally talks to himself, or speaks into a digital recorder, which means dialogue is very sparse. Director/co-writer Lorenzo Bianchini reveals backstory in a parallel plot that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the main story until the end.

He also largely eschews jump-scares in favor of ramping up the creep factor, and paces his movie slowly. Very slowly. 2001: A Space Odyssey seems brisk by comparison.

Its lack of incident, dialogue and character development will turn off the average filmgoer, and even the average horror fan. However, these aren’t flaws in the film per se; they’re simply things that the film does differently from what we expect. The flipside is that Bianchini has crafted an intensely atmospheric film.

We don’t need reams of character development; in this case, knowing so little about Contrada actually makes him so relatable. He becomes a sort of Everyman who wanders toward his doom almost at random. What happens to him is terrifying in part because his survey feels more like a camping trip than the sort of important expedition at the heart of The Blair Witch Project and his many imitators. Something like this could happen in any rural locale far off the beaten path.

Where Across the River really shines is in its mise-en-scene. Bianchini makes brilliant use of his locations and every shot hammers home the idea of isolation. (One thought I kept returning to while watching is that it must have been an extremely difficult shoot.) The decaying village oozes dread from every pore, the sort of place one would naturally expect Silent Hill-type goings-on to occur. Even the remote-camera footage is effective. The scene in which the girls first appear plays beautifully off of familiar found-footage clichés, like the Xbox Kinect scenes in Paranormal Activity 4 done right. And the sound design is a masterpiece.

As impressed as I was with it, I believe most will find it exceptionally dull. I can certainly sympathize with this point of view; there were points at which I found the film trying my patience–and I love slow films. Too many times I felt the urge to scream for it to get a move on already, and it could stand from a more ruthless round of editing–its hour-and-forty running time is just too long.

That being said, if you’re bored with the same-old same-old and have a yen to try something very unconventional, keep an eye out for Across the River. It’s not for everyone, but it just might be for you.

Italy; in Italian & Slovenian, with English subtitles. Directed by Lorenzo Bianchini. Starring Marco Marchese.

Thanks to the Chicago Cinema Society and Chicago Filmmakers for bringing Across the River to Chicago.

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The Clearing

IMDb
As an executive is held captive by an employee, it's up to his wife to deliver the ransom.


RogerEbert

A movie that begins with a pleasant morning in an ordinary marriage is never about mornings or marriages. As "The Clearing" opens, we meet Wayne and Eileen Hayes, long and apparently pleasantly married, in their elegant stone-walled mansion in a woodsy suburb. Wayne (Robert Redford) gets in his car, at the end of his driveway stops for a man who seems to know him, and finds himself kidnapped at gunpoint. Eileen (Helen Mirren) has a cup of coffee at the side of their pool.

We've already met the kidnapper, a man named Arnold Mack (Willem Dafoe). He lives with his perpetually disappointed wife and her father in a row house in a nearby city. We see him paste on a moustache in the mirror, which seems odd, and we follow him as he travels to his work (kidnapping) on a commuter train. Arnold approaches Wayne with such easy familiarity, waving a manila envelope as if it contained important papers, that Wayne automatically stops and rolls down the car window for him. Perhaps he even sort of remembers him, or feels that good manners requires him to say that he does.

The movie intercuts between two story lines: Wayne, his hands tied, led by Arnold on a long trek at gunpoint through a wooden area, and Eileen, concerned when he doesn't return home and eventually calling in the FBI. These time lines are not parallel, a fact that eventually occurs to us, along with its implications.

We learn a lot about Wayne as he and Arnold talk. Arnold has studied up on him, knows he's a self-made millionaire who bought and sold a car rental company at the right time. Wayne is rich, lives surrounded by luxury and is expensively dressed, but he has the tough instincts of a negotiator, and tries to talk Arnold out of the kidnapping. Arnold says the men who hired him are waiting in a cottage at the end of their walk, and Wayne asks him why those men should honor their deal with him. Arnold, who is not a professional criminal, listens politely and perhaps agrees with some of what Wayne says.

In the mansion, Eileen deals with at FBI agent (Matt Craven) who is all business, too much business. Her children, Tim and Jill (Alessandro Nivola and Melissa Sagemiller) join the vigil with their mother and privately share an interesting insight: At first, their mother was afraid Wayne might simply have run away from the marriage. The FBI man finds out about an affair Wayne had and discusses it in front of the children. That angers Eileen, who knew about it but didn't want them to know. And it sets up one of the most extraordinary scenes in the movie, a meeting between Eileen and Louise Miller (Wendy Crewson), who was her husband's mistress. This scene is written so precisely and acted so well that it sidesteps all the hazards of jealousy and sensation, and becomes simply a discussion of emotional realities.

What happens of course I cannot reveal, nor will it be what you expect. Indeed, the events in a late scene are so unexpected and yet so logical that we are nodding with agreement as we react with surprise. And there is another scene, after that, indirectly dealing with psychological truth, with why people do the things they do, although I must say no more.

"The Clearing" is the first film directed by the successful producer Pieter Jan Brugge ("The Insider," "The Pelican Brief," "Heat"). The screenplay is by Brugge and Justin Haythe, a British novelist. They know how to make a conventional thriller but are not interested in making one. Instead, they use the crime here as the engine to drive their parallel psychological portraits. While Eileen has the reality of her marriage made uncomfortably clear, Wayne and Arnold engage in a little subtle class warfare. Wayne acts as if he was born to lead, and Arnold thinks of himself as a born loser with one last chance to hit a jackpot. Certainly kidnapping offers enormous penalties and uncertain rewards, and Wayne thinks maybe Arnold doesn't really have the stomach for it.

What finally happens, and how, has a certain inevitable rightness to it, but you can't say you see it coming, especially since "The Clearing" doesn't feel bound by the usual formulas of crime movies. What eventually happens will emerge from the personalities of the characters, not from the requirements of Hollywood endings. Sensing that, we grow absorbed in the story, knowing that what happens along the way will decide what happens at the end.

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Legend Of Hell

IMDb

• An archaeologist discovers an ancient artifact and scroll which starts a series of events that kills her several times over in various time periods, past lives and locations. It seems that the artifact and scroll are linked to a gateway to hell. Various hellish creatures pour in throughout history, it looks like the gateway has been opened. The archaeologist teams up with warriors and guides from the past to try and close the gate.
  - Written by Phil King

DayDreamerPlayground

Selma (Karen Breece), an archaeologist, 38 years old, discovers during excavations in Morrokko a 5000 year old Portal, which door is locked from the inside by a strange mechanism. She also finds an ancient card, written in a secret language which isn’t spoken since over 3000 years. A short time later, Gabriel Moses (James Matthews), a pretended art dealer wants to buy the ancient card. An argument between him and Selma escalates and Selma gets killed in a shootout. Suddenly, she finds herself in medieval time and fortuitous gets one of three secret amulets which she is losing quickly again to one of Moses’ thugs. Selma gets killed again. From now on, the world seems to change rapidly in a supernatural way. She finds herself in the astral world, a dimension in the beyond. Horrifying creatures appear and try to kill Selma again, the landscapes seem to change more and more unrealistic until a dark skinned man appears, leading her away from those monsters to the guides Elias (Daryl Jackson) and Luise (Martina Ittenbach). He explains, that Selma returned to her first earthly life, to close the door to hell. She gave her amulet to Moses. In her second life in 2009, she found the portal – the door to hell. David himself lost 2600 years ago one Amulet to Moses and also did Luise in early medieval time. Moses became invincible. The card tells, that those three amulets are building a key which can unlock the gate to hell. Selma has to find the reminding on her life, she was living in the year 2009 and where she hides the card. A long way leads them through the precipice of hell to arrive at the place where card is hidden to destroy it. The closer they get to their destination, they have to realise that Moses already opened the gate to hell….. Legend of Hell  is produced, written and directed by Olaf Ittenbach. The acting is pretty bad, the camerawork and editing is pretty good. Legend of Hell is a bit confusing, some scenes simply do not make any sense, and at times it is quite boring. There are violent swordplay and gory shootouts but the fight choreography isn´t very good. And the shoot outs are a bit too exaggerated, I mean sure I like big juicy squibs but here we see how shotgunblasts make skulls explode even from more than 50 feet away. The soundtrack is good. Of course there is beautiful gore fx here and there, as can be expected when Olaf Ittenbach is at the helm but I should mention that there are some real lousy computer rendered effects (especially the demons) in this flick. The visual fx, there are a couple of scenes when they use green screen, look cheap and do not work. There´s no T & A in this. 

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Sinister

IMDb
A true-crime writer finds a cache of 8mm home movies films that suggest the murder he is currently researching is the work of a serial killer whose career dates back to the 1960s.


RogerEbert

"Sinister" is a story made of darkness: mysterious loud bangs in the attic, distant moans from the dead, vulnerable children, an egomaniac crime writer and his long-suffering wife, who is plenty fed up even before she discovers he has moved his family into the same house where horrifying murders took place.

The movie opens with four people standing with nooses around their necks and hoods over their heads. From above the frame, a power saw cuts off a tree limb. As it falls, its weight hangs the victims. Soon after Ellison Oswalt and wife Tracy (Ethan Hawke and Juliet Rylance) move into a spacious suburban house, we can see through the kitchen window that the hanging tree, with a distinctive split branch, is in the backyard.

What kind of a psycho would move his family into this house? Even the unfriendly sheriff tells him it's in "very poor taste." But the house was priced to sell. Almost immediately Ellison discovers it was no bargain. In the attic, he finds a box labeled "Home Movies," containing reels of Super-8 film and a projector to exhibit them.

"Sinister" is an undeniably scary movie, with performances adding enough human interest to give depth to the basic building blocks of horror. Ethan Hawke plays an introverted, driven man who wrote a best-selling, true-crime book some years ago and is convinced a book about those ghastly hangings will be another success — especially since one member of the doomed family is still missing.

His wife shares the misgivings of her children about being uprooted from their former home and being moved to an isolated house in the woods. Her distress grows as Ellison locks himself in his office, and grows distant and distracted. Their children, Trevor and Ashley (Michael Hall D'Addario and Clare Foley), begin to have night terrors and episodes of sleepwalking. Although Tracy remains ignorant of the house's true history, the kids discover it soon enough through playground tauntings. Ashley, who has been given one wall of her room to paint on, begins to summon disturbing images.

The film, directed by Scott Derrickson ("The Exorcism of Emily Rose"), focuses on Ellison, who spends much time scrutinizing the 8mm movies, which disturbingly show the murders of other families. He transfers them to his laptop, and his stop-action analysis uncovers almost hidden details. Some shots cause him to recoil in terror. He begins to hit the bottle. His wife grows hostile.

Almost all of the action occurs at night. Wouldn't you know for part of the time the power is off in their neighborhood? (The outage doesn't seem to affect the porch lights.) Even when the power seems to be working, Ellison for no reason prefers to creep around the house and climb into the attic carrying a small flashlight, which serves only to make him a target to anything that might be waiting in the dark. I was strongly reminded of Ellen Burstyn creeping into her attic in "The Exorcist," holding only a candle. All through "Sinister," you keep thinking, "Switch on the lights, fool!"

Three supporting characters are effective. Fred Dalton Thompson is the sheriff, whose initial hostility later seems only reasonable. James Ransone is his deputy, a crime buff who is star-struck by the famous writer and signs on as a volunteer researcher. (He dreams of being cited in the eventual book: "You know, like thanks to Deputy So-and-So, without whose invaluable help…").

And then there is Vincent D'Onofrio, as a university professor of the occult and mythological, who opens up a line of possibility that eventually saves the ending from being a red herring. Yes, the ending is horrifying, but I don't believe in that stuff. I'm pretty sure I don't.

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