Review of “The Reaping”
There’s nothing remotely original here in this supernatural horror-thriller by numbers. All the standard icons of the genre are slapped together mechanically, including innocent children, devil worshipping small-town folk, creepy mansions and priests flicking through biblical manuscripts desperately trying to discover what evil will plague the next scene before the pages mysteriously catch fire.
Writers Chad and Carey Hayes deployed similar tactics for the trashy 2005 remake of House of Wax and Director Stephen Hopkins (The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Blown Away) goes along for the ride, proving his versatility but without managing to scratch below the surface of the genre and find anything of spiritual or emotional interest.
Katherine Winter (Hillary Swank) is a university professor specializing in investigating supernatural phenomena around the world, and she gets called to a remote bible-belt town after the local river runs red. She takes her assistant Ben (Idris Eba) who’s a believer, and her own disturbed past that has left her without a family but with an unshakeable faith in using the scientific method to explain away the mysterious. Once in the town, she meets charming local Doug (David Morrissey) who of course owns the spooky mansion (complete with dodgy electrical wiring, spiral staircases and billowing sheer curtains) where she and Ben must stay. Katherine and Ben start their investigation, at the centre of which seems to be a young girl who appears randomly in Katherine’s waking and sleeping worlds, and a series of events that bear an uncanny resemblance to the ten plagues of Egypt as explained in the Book of Exodus. From here we lurch through a well trodden path of warnings ignored, separation of the good guys, and investigation of dark tunnels, and head for an apocalyptic climax where good and evil must arm-wrestle for control of the ending and the likely sequel.
The film relies upon a combination of nicely shot impressionism and heavy handed sound design to create its sinister mood, but the cast wander through the clichéd story without joy or energy and often labour with the clunky expositional dialogue. Swank in particular looks wooden and miscast. To the ten biblical plagues of the story (including locusts, lice and boils) are added the curse of terrible southern accents (in particular English actor Morrissey) and the blight of dream flashbacks. The time has definitely come for someone to re-invent the supernatural horror film.
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