Red Lights (2004)

Involving enough, yes, but the real tension isn't in the onscreen happenings (though those are gripping enough) but in the push-pull relationship between what the film appears to say and what it means to say. [By the way, we're entering SPOILER TERRITORY here.] Taken at face value, the film is a basic '70s-revenge flick, sort of a Straw Dogs of the mind. What I find fascinating is the way the film undermines this even as it brings it out. The discovery of the dead body and the revelation of rape (and therefore an unconscious revenging) result in a payoff for Antoine's constant belittling of himself as "not a man." By avenging, even unintentionally, the defiling of his wife, he becomes that macho macho man that he's been hungering to become. Yet, even as this is going on, the film has been re-feminizing him (as it were) in the character of the worried mother bird -- he runs around, making sure that the kids are okay and the spouse is taken care of and getting weepy and everything else stereotypically "feminine." This goes double if one accepts the film's insinuations that none of the revenging actually happened (that Antoine, in his inebriated state, more or less imagined everything after his wife disappears). If we strip that away from Antoine, he's not the manly man anymore... but his concern for all that matters to him belatedly marks him as better than that -- a good man. Even if I'm completely off track here, though, this remains one hell of a thriller. It's expertly made and wonderfully suspenseful. The acting is fine on all counts too. So it's worth a look either way. Is it just me, or does Vincent Deniard look more than a bit like Ben Affleck?

Grade: B+