111 min | R | September 10, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Madison starts seeing visions of brutal murders as they happen, killings committed by a figure she cannot stop and does not understand. James Wan abandons the slow-burn dread of his earlier work for something louder and stranger. The first ninety minutes promise a horror film the last twenty refuses to deliver.
Madison Mitchell survives a violent home attack and begins witnessing murders in real time, glimpsed like waking nightmares she has no power to stop. The killings are real. The killer seems to know her. James Wan builds the film as a haunted-house mystery that keeps insisting it is something else underneath. The real subject is the gap between what the body remembers and what the mind allows itself to know, and the film withholds that secret until it can spring it.
Annabelle Wallis plays Madison as a woman worn down before the film begins, trapped in an abusive marriage and a series of pregnancy losses. Wallis keeps Madison passive for long stretches, reacting more than acting, and the performance flattens when the script asks her to carry dread alone. Maddie Hasson plays her sister Sydney with more energy and does the legwork of the investigation that Madison cannot. George Young and Michole Briana White play Detectives Kekoa Shaw and Regina Moss as procedural furniture, delivering exposition between set pieces. The supporting cast exists to react to the killer, and the reactions are stiffer than the violence demands.
Wan directs from a screenplay by Akela Cooper, working from a story he developed with Cooper and Ingrid Bisu. The most distinctive choice is a single overhead shot that tracks Madison through her house from above as the floor plan turns transparent, the camera gliding through walls as she flees. Michael Burgess shoots the murders in saturated reds and deep shadow, and the production design leans on a Gothic hospital basement that belongs in a different decade of horror. The score borrows a familiar pop melody and warps it into a recurring motif for the killer. These flourishes announce a director enjoying himself, and the craft outpaces the story it serves.
The film spends its first two acts as a competent supernatural thriller and saves its real identity for a third act that detonates everything before it. That reveal is genuinely deranged, and it is also the moment the film admits the buildup was filler. Wan wants the twist to recontextualize the dull stretches as a long con, but the con depends on the audience tolerating flat scenes and flatter dialogue to reach the payoff. The closing stretch is gleeful and committed and almost worth the wait. What comes before it is a setup running out the clock until the movie it wanted to be finally arrives.