Premonition
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, PG-13, 96 m, 2007
Directed by Mennan Yapo. Stars Sandra Bullock, Julian McMahon, Shyann McClure, et al.

A ghostly haze envelops Mennan Yapo’s Premonition. The color scheme is muted and grayish, and there’s an icy sense of foreboding that pervades every shot. The wintry mise-en-scène is apropos: the dull sky and turning leaves suggest something is dying within the marriage of the story’s upright, middle-class couple. But the fogginess of the images also hints at the unreliability of our memories—the frustrating subjectivity of recall. The non-linear script blurs the division between what’s real and what’s not, and although this is a Hollywood production, it lets alone that unfortunate financial concession that often rewards ticket-buyers for their emotional involvement by wrapping things up on a cheery note. Though just about every frame of Premonition seems to have been scored by the Grim Reaper’s scythe, there are traces of light that get through. This might be a depressant’s idea of a life-affirming movie.

One morning after she drops her two daughters off at school, housewife Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock, who seems to be getting more attractive with age) returns home to discover a cryptic message from her husband, Jim, on the answering machine. His tone is halting, unsure, and his allusion to a recent heart-to-heart doesn’t register with Linda. She tries to call him back, but to no avail. Then she hears the doorbell, which I’m sure doesn’t always chime this ominously. It’s Sheriff Reilly (Marc Macaulay), who tells Linda that Jim was killed in a car accident. (We can tell by the sheriff’s careworn face that he’s probably delivered this sort of news on a hundred occasions but it only gets harder for him each time.) While he goes about spluttering the police department’s approved message of condolence, Linda’s world falls out of focus. She comes back, though, and takes note of a murder of crows in the dreary sky above. (This is an inspired—and purportedly improvised—piece of business; resourceful direction and intuitive acting intersect to create something that’s bone-chillingly powerful in its understatement.) For the sake of her children, Linda reigns in her emotions, a trick she most likely learned from her stern and unyielding mother, Joanne (well played by Kate Nelligan). That night, after Granny Jo has put the little ones to bed, Linda curls up on the couch with a picture from her wedding day, her loss weighing on her heart as heavily as six feet of earth weighs on the dead.

The next morning, Linda wakes up in her bedroom. She pads downstairs to discover Jim (Julian McMahon) sitting at the kitchen counter and enjoying a bowl of Raisin Bran. She’s relieved; it was all a dream. Still, something’s not quite right with Jim. He seems distant, remote. Linda tries not to make too much of it; she’s happy just to have him back amongst the living. But throughout the course of her day, she notices things that inexplicably forecast events that happened in her dream the night before. She also has to keep dealing with Yapo’s penchant for heavy symbolism: While hanging laundered bed sheets out to dry, she slips on one of her kids’ toys and falls atop a crow’s bloody corpse.

And so the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away—again. The following morning, Linda goes downstairs to find her family and friends all dressed in black and looking distressed. Jim, it would appear, is dead, and his funeral is scheduled for later that afternoon. (And the less that’s said about what happens there, the better. Suffice it to say that it’s a horrific scene.) Is this a continuation of Linda’s nightmare or is this her reality? If it’s the latter, she just might be losing her mind: there are far too many things that she can’t come up with an explanation for, such as a discarded bottle of Lithium in the bathroom sink, mirrors haphazardly covered with blankets and throws, and a ghastly array of cuts on her oldest daughter’s once angelic face.

Linda soon determines that she hasn’t been hallucinating any of the last few days, but rather she’s being tossed backward and forward in time. (Whether it’s true or not is kept ambiguous, and wisely so.) For Linda, it’s anything but a pleasant journey: She can only find the answer to this or that question when the Sandman feels like transporting her to that respective day. (Bill Murray had it a lot easier in Groundhog Day; at least he knew what he was in store for each morning he woke up to “I’ve Got You, Babe.”) What makes Premonition so compelling (though some might find it laborious) is that its non-sequential series of events serves to reveal the truth of its primary character; the through-line here is Linda’s arc. (I doubt even the dopiest viewer could miss the meaning behind a recurring shot of Linda’s daughters working on a jigsaw puzzle with grams.) But what exactly is this poor girl supposed to be learning? That each day is a gift? When Linda finally figures out the chronology of the week she’s bouncing around in (Thursday, Monday, Saturday and so forth), she discovers that her weird trip will end on Wednesday, the day of her husband’s death. There is some suspense in seeing if Linda will be able to alter the past and keep Jim in the picture, but Yapo is too serious of an artist to compromise his vision just so we can be sent away with warm fuzzies. This will undoubtedly alienate a goodly share of the film’s audience, particularly Sandra Bullock fans who long for another entry in the Miss Congeniality franchise.

Bullock, who appears in virtually every scene in Premonition, gives a strong, lyrical performance. Truth be told, I’ve always been able to take her or leave her (the exquisitely shot Forces of Nature being the one exception), but what she demonstrates here is that she’s an actress of tremendous depth. It’s anything but a lazy performance; what she puts herself through emotionally is just about heroic. (But you can’t expect much in the way of fluffiness when you have to deal with losing your significant other over and over again.) The musical score by Klaus Badelt is suitably muffled, complementing Torsten Lippstock’s shadowy photography and Neil Travis’s velvety-smooth cutting. This is director Mennan Yapo’s first English-language film, and though nobody could ever confuse it with high art, it’s far richer fare than a lot of what Tinsel Town puts out these days. 

July 25, 2009

© Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.