Based partly upon a true story of peculiar circumstances leading up to a catastrophe in a small West Virginian town in the sixties, The Mothman Prophecies has been adapted by screenwriter Richard Hatem and director Mark Pellington into a gripping and infinitely spooky drama focusing roughly on the same events. This was also one of the first films whose advance publicity and poster was deemed good enough to be used on our homepage, a precedent that is still in use today.
Washington Post journalist John Klein (Gere) and his wife Mary (Messing) are returning from a successful house hunt when, whilst driving down a quiet suburban road, Mary suddenly sees something dark and frightening coming towards the car. Slamming on the brakes she loses control of the car and bangs her head against the side window. After being rushed by her husband to the local hospital it is revealed that not only is she suffering from an extremely rare and always fatal brain tumour, but that John never saw what was coming towards the car. Did the tumour cause the hallucination, or was it real and a warning of what was wrong with her?
Two years later John is still working for the paper and takes a trip out of the state when on the back roads his car dies, his phone refuses to work and even his watch stops, shades of The X-Files for sure. When he goes to the nearest house for help he is accosted at gunpoint by a man who swears John has been there the previous two nights at exactly the same time and with exactly the same request. The local police officer Connie Mills (Linney) is called in and defuses the situation but already there are more questions than answers and the characters are as puzzled as the audience. Even more peculiar is the revelation that John is nowhere near his intended destination, and appears to have travelled 400 miles in the wrong direction in little over an hour. Clearly he has been drawn there for some purpose, but for what?
The film is a dark and spine-tingling descent into madness for the characters, not only John but also the townspeople who increasingly come to see the creature themselves. It however is cleverly kept off screen by Pellington, who prefers instead to use a smoke and mirrors approach to mask the apparent look of it, and simple drawings to give it some depth and imagery. However, its purpose is unclear. Is it there to save the people of the town from something, or is it there to taunt them of a tragedy they cannot prevent? Various individuals in the film take on the disparate roles, with Will Patton�s Gordon increasingly the believer, and Linney�s Officer Miller more the Scully of the group. Caught between these polar opposites an increasingly agitated Gere sets out to find the truth amongst a welter of claim and counter-claim.
The Mothman Prophecies was genuinely eerie; the whole film had a gloom over it that belied the tension and apprehension of the principle characters, and their hushed tones are an accurate representation of the behaviour of people who don�t want to believe what they increasingly know to be true, for fear of either embarrassment or being proved correct. Gere and Linney make a good leading pair and their acting is all at once fitting for the look and feel of the film. At first bemused their early impressions increasingly give way to doubt and worry, and while Gere continues to fall into obsession Linney�s acting is a model of restraint and compassion. She trusts him but that doesn�t mean that she believes everything he says. Director Pellington on the other hand keeps the film as vague as possible, and by the end nothing is resolved; the creature is not discovered or understood, its intentions are still clouded and the characters are no closer to finding the truth they have so desperately searched for. None of that matters however, as the final twist is sufficient in itself to give all the answers the audience need, wrapping up as it does many plot points not directly associated with the Mothman itself. |
