Taglines: Once you believe, you die.
On May 21, 1973, six people conduct The Charles Experiment, a para-psychological experiment, in which they stare at a drawing of a deceased man, Charles Reamer, hoping to summon his spirit. Years later, four college students, Patrick (Tom Felton), Lydia (Julianna Guill), Ben (Sebastian Stan) and Greg (Luke Pasqualino) attempt to recreate the Charles Experiment on a larger scale by using modern technology. During the experiment, something attacks the students and pulls Lydia into the wall.
Some time later, Ben and his girlfriend Kelly (Ashley Greene) are living together. One evening, they discover strange burn marks on their counters. Kelly finds both doors wide open, even though they had locked them. They decide to change the locks and install surveillance cameras. Later, Kelly finds a large amount of mold and spores on the laundry room floor while Ben finds even more in a crawlspace. Ben gets 36 “urgent” emails from Patrick that first inform him of a new attempt at the Charles Experiment, followed by a warning that “containment failed” and finally “you are in danger”.
The Apparition is a 2012 American-German supernatural horror film, written and directed by Todd Lincoln, making his directorial debut, and starring Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan, Tom Felton, Julianna Guill and Rick Gomez. The plot follows three college students who, after the death of their friend, must battle a supernatural force they summoned themselves.
The film was loosely inspired by the Philip experiment conducted in 1972.[4] The film was a box office bomb and was cited by critics as one of the worst horror movies of 2012. It was also the last Warner Bros. Pictures horror film to date to be released under its own label before resorting to New Line Cinema to release all future horror movies made by Warner Bros. Pictures
The Apparition was a box office bomb. The film came in at #12 in its opening weekend at the box office, with a gross of $2.84 million. According to Box Office Mojo, “With the unusually-low theater count and a practically non-existent marketing effort, it’s clear Warner Bros. was trying to bury this movie, and they appear to have succeeded.” As of November 2012, it grossed $4.9 million domestically and $9.6 million worldwide.
Film Review for The Apparition
“The Apparition” feels like an attempt to take one of those terrible Dan Brown best-sellers like “The Da Vinci Code” and transform it from a crudely written pulp thriller with quasi-religious undertones into a serious-minded art-house drama, eschewing cheap thrills for serious inquiries about the nature of faith. This is an interesting concept in theory and for a while, it is undeniably compelling to watch, aided in no small part by a couple of strong performances at its center. However, as it goes on (and on), the drama starts getting more diffuse as it tries to figure out a way of resolving the central question driving the story—does God exist or not?—in a satisfactory manner.
Jacques Mayano (Vincent Lindon) is a celebrated French journalist who has just returned from an assignment in the Middle East that ended tragically—an explosion killed his close friend and colleague, leaving him with both a painful ringing in his ears and a profound case of survivor’s guilt. While staying at home in an unsuccessful attempt to process the trauma, he is summoned by a French cardinal to the Vatican for a top-secret meeting. It seems that in a remote village in the south of France, an 18-year-old novice named Anna (Galatéa Bellugi) has claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary.
Now that the site of her vision has become a pilgrimage destination for the faithful from around the world—with a lucrative cottage industry of t-shirts, prayer books and the like springing up as well—church officials have elected to open a formal investigation of religious and scientific minds in order to determine whether Anna’s story is true or a big hoax. With his keen journalistic mind and lack of any significant religious convictions, Jacques has been chosen to head up the inquiry.
Upon arriving in town, Jacques meets the other members of the team of investigators (including Elina Löwensohn in a role about as far removed from her part in the current oddity “Let The Corpses Tan” as can be), local priest Father Borrodine (Patrick d’Assumçao), whose reluctance to cooperate with the investigation may have something to do with the money currently pouring in thanks to Anna’s notoriety, and, eventually, Anna herself.
While he may not have an ecclesiastical horse in this particular race to speak of, Jacques does find himself becoming increasingly intrigued by Anna as a person when looking into her past—she was an orphan raised in foster homes before entering the convent—to find anything that might prove or disprove her claims. And yet, even as an improbable friendship begins to develop between the two—presumably fueled in no small part from the sense of isolation that they both now suffer from—Jacques makes some discoveries that raise questions about both Anna’s claims and the position of the church, especially regarding a slick religious marketer (Anatole Taubman) who wants to make Anna into an international multimedia sensation.
The early scenes of “The Apparition” are the best, especially a long a fascinating sequence set in the Vatican’s underground archives in which Jacques has his mission explained to him and gets a glimpse of the number of previous claims of apparitions that have been investigated over the years. The trouble is that while co-writer/director Xavier Giannoli does a very good job of establishing things early on, he doesn’t quite pull it off.
His decision to take a very serious—almost solemn—approach to the material is initially interesting but becomes a slog, especially regarding story aspects like the crass commercialization of Anna’s visions that cry out for an approach that is more overtly angry or satirical that what is presented here. The pacing of the narrative is also a bit strange—the story is broken up into six sections clocking in at about 140 minutes and yet somehow manages to feel both too slow and too rushed at the same time, like a TV miniseries that was hurriedly reduced to a feature length without ever finding the right rhythm.
The biggest problem, perhaps inevitably, arrives when the conclusion has to give answers for what may or may not have happened. The trouble is that the movie wants to both provide a concrete explanation while holding out an olive branch to maintaining the concept of faith even in the modern era.
By attempting to simultaneously pull off both of these notions, Giannoli is certainly being ambitious but he ultimately falls short as the second half of the story starts getting caught up in the mechanics of the plot while increasingly leaving the more ambiguous elements that it has been dealing with to the side. The worst part is the conclusion, which tries to wrap the story up with a dopey explanation that makes the finales offered up by Dan Brown seem plausible by comparison, as well as a last-minute revelation that forces the reconsideration of everything seen up to that moment.
“The Apparition” is not entirely without interest—the early scenes, as noted, are undeniably fascinating, it looks good throughout and the performances by Lindon and Bellugi are both effective, especially when they are in scenes together. However, the story doesn’t quite seem to have a clear concise idea of what it’s trying to accomplish. Regarding spiritual matters, “The Apparition” is undeniably more serious-minded and more successful than the likes of films such as “God’s Not Dead” and its ilk. As an example of satisfying dramatic storytelling, however, it falls frustratingly short.
The Apparition (2012)
Directed by: Todd Lincoln
Starring: Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan, Tom Felton, Julianna Guill, Luke Pasqualino, Rick Gomez, Anna Clark, Suzanne Ford, Tim Williams, Melissa Goldberg, Marti Matulis, John Grady
Screenplay by: Todd Lincoln
Production Design by: Steve Saklad
Cinematography by: Daniel Pearl
Film Editing by: Jeff Betancourt, Tom Elkins, Harold Parker
Costume Design by: Kimberly Adams-Galligan
Set Decoration by: Daniele Drobny
Art Direction by: David Scheunemann, Steve Summersgill, James F. Truesdale
Music by: tomandandy
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for terror/frightening images and some sensuality.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: August 24, 2012
Hits: 137
