The only thing I remembered about "Premonition" before seeing it was that it had one of the best movie posters I'd ever seen and a forgettable trailer. But I'm a sucker for thrillers, so when I saw it was on cable the other evening, I forced myself to sit down and check it out.
Starring Sandra Bullock and one of the dudes from "Nip/Tuck", this flick started out by examining this pair's descent from a glowing, newly engaged couple (even the names, Jim and Linda, are a cliché) into a family with a couple of kids, waging separate battles against mind-numbing domesticity. But merely 10 minutes in, Linda receives a strange voice-mail message from her husband, then a visit from a cop telling her her husband has just been killed in a car accident, which understandable jars her into a near-catatonic numbness.
Ten minutes after that in the flick, Linda awakens to her husband having mysteriously reappeared. We quickly are submerged into a series of questions about whether she is having a dream or whether she is experiencing déjà vu and what has taken place while she has slept and who she has met and who she hasn't. The audience is left to wonder just what is real and what isn't—especially after Linda discovers her oldest daughter on the swingset, her face covered with cuts from an accident that Linda doesn't remember occurring. The youngest daughter sets the tone of the movie by asking her mother, if she wasn't there to see her father die, how do you know he died, then?
Beheadings, electrocutions, shattered glass doors, mirrors covered with towels, a mysterious woman appearing at the funeral, lithium, wine, creepy-ass psychiatrists (played by Peter Stormare, best remembered as Nihilist #1 from "Big Lebowski"), crow symbolism, interventions and forced committals … Linda endures a host of incidents and characters that she can't understand, remember or place. With her sanity running thin, Linda tries to determine chronology and come to a realization of what day she is living and why by creating a calendar that aligns incidents with days of the week. After she discovers that Jim was having an affair, Linda begins to see husband's impending death as a punishment for future adultery and how that would impact the family. "If I let Jim die," she wonders, "is that the same thing as killing him?"
Eventually, with nowhere else to turn, Linda finds her way to church, where she relates her story to Father Kennedy (played by the dude who was Mike Novick in "24"), who tells her that her experiences aren't unusual throughout history, and are usually attributed as "dangers of the faithless." "Nature abhors a vacuum," he tells her, and these unexplained phenomenon are what fill the void. With this realization, and a joint one by Jim to not go through with his affair, a potential happy ending is set up, with a reconciliation featuring everything but singing angels taking place between Jim and Linda. But then …
BAM!
Something slightly crazy and mostly predictable happens, and we cut back to the priest saying, "Every day we're alive can be a miracle." The ending is nicely filmed, with fitting music, and the slow-motion reveal at the end shows a very unexpected, surprise twist. At its worst, "Premonition" is hard to follow, repetitive, difficult to understand and analyze, and formulaic. On the bright side, however, this flick subtly morphs from a horror/thriller into a love story with a memorable ending; I consider this "bright" because it's interesting and unique, which is what passes for welcome these days in the world of cinema.
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