Premise: A blind piano player gets caught up in the investigation surrounding the suspicious death of her upstairs neighbor.
Well...sort of...
This is the moment when I'll remind you that I approach these Reactions assuming you've either seen the movie or don't care if you know what happens.
I say sort of, because, as you know, Natalie Dormer isn't actually blind after all. That's the big twist of the movie. The problem is, we were laughing at the prospect of that being the twist pretty much from the start of the movie. That's a great twist if you can pull it off. It's also absolutely preposterous.
There's a reason why we remember great twists. It's because they are so hard to pull off. For a twist to really work, the movie needs to play like it doesn't need the twist to still be good. The Sixth Sense, even without the twist is really creepy and has a satisfying conclusion with Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette even if it never reveals that Bruce Willis was a ghost the whole time. It also uses savvy editing in a way that's not appreciated enough. The Usual Suspects is full of entertaining characters and has a fun crime story, even if we don't find out that Kevin Spacey was Keyser Soze. Ocean's Eleven is a fun heist movie even if it's not revealed at the end that most of the drama was a misdirect. In Darkness isn't really that interesting without its twist. I spent most of the movie unclear about what was going on. It actually got to the point where I was guessing the "twists" just because they were the only way any of this would make sense.
The other important aspect about twists is that they need to feel remotely plausible after the fact. Natalie Dormer faking her blindness doesn't pass that test at all. The movie is full of unguarded moments where it doesn't make sense for her to keep up the ruse. More importantly, it seems impossible for her to keep that ruse up. Just think about how hard it is to not look at something when it surprises you. There's a reason why, when people are faking blindness, they wear sunglasses. The movie tries to explain this away by saying that her father trained he to act blind like her sister. First of all, huh? That only makes sense as a story history if you are making a movie where the twist at the end is that she's not really blind. Second...ok, still huh? I'm not over how dumb of a backstory that is. Third, I don't think that can really be trained the way the movie thinks it can. Are you telling me she really had that kind of discipline since she was a preteen?
So, the story is rubbish. That's not a death knell. Most thrillers have dumb stories. I did really like Natalie Dormer's performance. At least, I thought she was convincingly blind. That's really hard. I'd love to see a gag reel for this movie that’s just takes of her swearing after accidentally moving her eyes during a scene. She holds the screen well despite the extra layer of not being aware of the camera. It was funny how much Neil Maskell's Detective Mills was in a different movie that he was the star of. He was a weird change of pace whenever he came on screen. It's the kind of character where, as soon as he pops up, you know there's going to be a twist. You just know there will be a scene where he's looking through some old crime photos or a newspaper archive (or in this case, stares at a wall) and finds that one picture that reveals everything too late. You don't have that character for any other reason.
Natalie Dormer wasn't enough to salvage the movie for me. The story is needlessly complicated and hinges on an unsatisfying twist. The movie uses a really dreary color palette that makes London look as ugly as I've ever seen it. I see a lot of room for this to be a fun, silly thriller. They just missed the mark.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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