Swank in buckets of blood

What could have been a ingenious supernatural thriller soon fizzles out after an interesting first reel. How the excellent Hilary Swank or Stephen Rhea got involved with this lot is anyone's guess. The storyline has a small Southern bible belt town inundated with the seven plagues of ancient Egypt. A river turns to blood, huge (plastic) frogs drop from the skies, cattle die of mysterious disease, and so on. But the most disturbing sequence is the first, setting the theme of the film in the city of Conception, Chile in which an apparent miracle turns out to be the result of horrendous pollution.

Swank plays Katharine Winter a ex-minister who lost faith due to the murder of her husband and daughter in South Africa, now a university lecturer specialising in debunking miracles. She is called in by local schoolteacher Doug Blackwell (David Morrissey) to investigate what appears to be a river changed to blood flowing near the remote Louisiana town of Haven in which all the fish have died. Winter and her assistant Ben (Idris Elba) arrive on the scene and before you can say "Apocalypse Now" other plagues of biblical proportions follow while a young girl Lauren (AnnaSophia Robb) seems to have some unholy connection with the disasters. The agitated towns folk get unpleasant ideas about lynching the child.

Unfortunately despite an occasional good special effect Aussie director Stephen Hopkins (The Life and Death of Peter Sellers) handles it all rather like a video music clip, telegraphing the climatic moments with flash cuts and thunderous sound. This skatty direction fails to allow suspense to mount and a plot that keeps unraveling reduces the impact considerably. There is a significant twist in the end of the story which you will probably see coming. The most convincing plague is of locusts, but even that is never as frightening as you would expect, really there is no feeling of evil dread here. Take Kubrick's "The Shining" for example of how the supernatural may be brought to the screen with real suspense and terror.

There is little character development and the cast just go through the motions, Swank (Million Dollar Baby, Boys Don't Cry) adds star value to the project yet doing scarcely more than looking fetching in some of her outfits even when battling locusts or maggoty meat. David Morrissey (Basic Instinct 2) is bland as the school teacher with sinister motives, while AnnaSophia Robb (Bridge to Terabithia) has only to gaze wistfully at the camera and run through trees. As mentioned the cheap dramatic shocks are left to the sound and picture editors in a predicable result not really dependant on the cast.

The idea of a town being devastated by the Biblical plagues is interesting in itself and could have been better developed. In this case it soon become another battle between the powers of good and the Devil. Borrowing from earlier movies like The Exorcist and The Omen, we've been over this ground before by better directors and writers. In fact you might be advised to borrow a DVD of the Exorcist or the original The Omen and get more bang for your buck. Two stars to commiserate on what could have been a really intriguing movie.

John Bale

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The Reaping

Our rating:

Director: Stephen Hopkins
Cast: Hilary Swank, David Morrisey, AnnaSophia Robb
Release: April 19, 2007
Rated: MA

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