A film noir fever dream with a sci-fi secret, in which a man searching for his identity makes a discovery that quite literally makes the ground shift beneath his feet. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a hotel bathroom; there's a dead girl all cut
up in the other room, and he has no idea how she got there or who she is. In fact, he has no idea who he is, though he seems to have a beautiful lounge-singer wife (Jennifer Connelly) and some weird bald-headed guys in HELLRAISER gear on his tail, though he couldn't begin to tell you why.
Things start getting really weird at midnight, when everyone in the city falls mysteriously into some sort of dead sleep, while Murdoch remains awake to see the very buildings around him twisting and changing, like concrete seeds sprouting in some bizarre mind-bending nightmare. In a film in which
acting isn't the main event, Rocky Horror creator Richard O'Brien -- you probably remember him as Riff Raff -- delivers a deeply creepy turn as the sinister Mr. Hand, Murdoch's chief nemesis, and Connelly looks nothing short of breathtaking in her '40s-era gowns, though her performance is
rather less memorable. Alex Proyas, who directed THE CROW, isn't a particularly strong storyteller, but the story -- a rather silly twist on the "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" thing -- truly isn't the point either. It's all about the amazing look, cobbled together from an astonishingly
evocative range of sources: NOSFERATU and MAD LOVE, BRAZIL and METROPOLIS, a haunted mosaic of bits and pieces of movie memories. --Maitland McDonagh
