Lost Cause

For all the Satanic emissaries and possessed psychopaths who parade through Lost Souls, the movie's title, I suspect, refers to those unfortunate moviegoers who wander into the multiplex seeking thrills or entertainment or even coherence, all of which are more likely to be found on an acid trip. Lost Souls is merely the latest in the series of Catholic subversives-in the footsteps of Stigmata, End of Days and Bless the Child-that likely prompted the rerelease of The Exorcist, which is Hollywood's way of claiming temporary sanity.

The movie's star, Winona Ryder, is that rare actor who seems most assured in period pieces (The Age of Innocence, Little Women, The Crucible), and while Lost Souls can accurately be described as godawful, period, it doesn't quite qualify as an historical foray. That probably explains Ryder's affectless performance as Maya Larkin, an exorcised Catholic who teaches Sunday school, broods in gardens and, on the evidence, experiments unsuccessfully with peroxide. After a disagreeable encounter with a possessed person, Maya predicts that the expelled demon will next occupy the body (and soul-ooh...) of bestselling crime novelist Peter Kelson. Kelson is played by Ben Chaplin, looking as though he'd rather be elsewhere. Ben, I empathize.

Maya tells Kelson something to the effect of "You're gonna be the Antichrist," which doesn't elicit the expected rush of apocalyptic terror-or even a blink from him, really. But a rash of inscrutable supernatural phenomena soon convince Kelson of the girl's claims: he's particularly troubled when he discerns in his dreams the letters XES, which, as any red-blooded moviegoer who can spell could tell him, is "sex" spelled backwards. Savvy!

The inversion, however, is lost on Kelson. He is, it seems, a little WOLS. All this is the idiot's riff on the "red rum" device from The Shining-the crucial difference, naturally, being that "red rum," comprising bona fide words, represented a legitimately illusive decoy, while "xes," which sounds like a Polish village, is clearly "sex" spelled end to beginning. Of course, we're grateful for the distraction, since thinking about sex is more entertaining than anything happening on screen. Thinking about feline leukemia, in fact, is more entertaining.

So Maya and Kelson prepare to do battle with the infernal scourge on the spiritual horizon, and we're left to contemplate cat cancer and the mercurial career of Philip Baker Hall, currently a retired politico in The Contender and a crotchety priest here. Lost Souls marks the directorial debut of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who won Oscars for his work on Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, movies you think of during this one as a man afire thinks of water. Even in the director's chair, Kaminski remains a consummate imagist, substituting somber mood for dramatic conviction and agile camerawork for craft. And while some will applaud Lost Souls for its lush visual verve, its muted palette and hyperreal aesthetics, all this resplendence is to be expected from a cinematographer of Kaminski's caliber. If Lost Souls is intended as an exercise in opulence, then it would have done well to ditch its overcooked, underthought dramatic developments, which the director fails utterly to clarify.

Films like this, of course, aren't entirely without merit, since it's fun to concoct appraisals analogous to their spectral content. Herewith, then: Lost Souls is what Dante might have found had he kept on descending-a visceral, miserable hell of a bad movie.