The Lake House

From its opening montage showing line after line of spidery calligraphy, The Lake House marks itself as the anti-You’ve Got Mail, renouncing that movie’s computer-age reliance on email and attempting to reclaim handwritten letters as the nexus of film romance. If epistolary love affairs – with their cycle of reading, writing and waiting for a reply – are inherently uncinematic, The Lake House offers an intriguing time-lapse solution. Reunited for the first time since Speed (1994), Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are Kate and Alex, tenants of the eponymous house living two years apart but able to communicate via notes left in the house’s mailbox.

Adapted from the 2000 Korean drama Shiweolae, Alejandro Agresti’s film thus creates both an obstacle to the course of the couple’s love – they fall for each other immediately but have trouble meeting up in their respective time zones – and an effective delivery system for their billets-doux. Notes posted by Alex in 2004 appear instantaneously in the same mailbox in Kate’s 2006, and vice versa, with none of the lovelorn clock-watching that might have deadened the story’s pace. The immediate response time allows the couple to use brief, conversational phrases (‘Who are you?’ ‘Can this be happening?’) reminiscent of web chatroom speak. Though peppered with references to Kerouac, Dostoevsky and Jane Austen, this bookish romance is perhaps less literary than it claims.

Playwright David Auburn’s script works hard to convince us that the two-year barrier is as insurmountable as the characters believe. In a scene of near contact at a railway station, Alex chases after the departing train on which the 2004 Kate, who does not yet know who he is, looks bemusedly out from her accelerating carriage. Agresti aims for Brief Encounter levels of heightened pathos, but the moment is undermined by the viewer’s nagging feeling that the pair are making their rendezvous more difficult than it need be. Bullock’s Kate, in particular, appears resigned to tormented inertia.

Apart from providing the opportunity for one or two novel romantic gestures, as when Alex plants a sapling outside Kate’s future window that grows, as if in a second, into a beautiful tree, the concurrent timeframes merely entangle the narrative in space-time paradoxes, which could be happily overlooked if more fun had been had with time-juggling. Instead, the device seems an arbitrary means of delaying consummation, not unlike Kate’s de facto boyfriend Morgan (Dylan Walsh), a priggish bore who forgets Valentine’s Day and responds to a passionate scene between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious by asking Kate to turn the television down.

The film’s third character should really have been the lake house of the title, a glass-walled bungalow standing on stilts on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Regrettably, the building is imbued with neither the physical presence nor the required aura of magic to justify its centrality to the narrative. How disappointing that in this hymn to the letter, the house itself should prove not worth writing home about.

This review features in the August 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.

Half Light

Don’t look now, but while his parents – bestselling novelist Rachel Carson (Demi Moore) and her envious, unpublished husband, Brian (Henry Ian Cusick) – obsess over their work in the study of their canal-side townhouse, little Thomas is outside and playing a little too close to the water. When the inevitable tragedy occurs, Rachel relocates to a Scottish island and, as in Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 classic, it is not long before the local psychic is having visions of the drowned child. Half Light creates immediate problems by aping the plot of Don’t Look Now so closely: director Craig Rosenberg’s handling of the opening drowning scene appears flatly conventional next to Roeg’s visionary fragmentation. But as the derivative waters become muddied with elements from Vertigo and The Shining, an enjoyably trashy mystery brews.

In her first starring role since Passion of Mind (2000), Moore is gamely incongruous as the London-based American author donning flat cap to seek renewed inspiration and emotional solace in the Scottish wilds. Amid the heather and crashing waves, she falls in love with the tousle-haired lighthouse keeper Angus (Hans Matheson), but remains haunted by the past. Thomas’ former toys become the medium for a series of eerie messages, apparently from beyond the grave: an Etch A Sketch self-writes ‘look behind you’ warnings, a toy soldier barks automated threats, magnetic letters on the refrigerator are repositioned to read ‘Thomas was here’. Oddly, this proves freakier for Rachel than it is for the viewer; unlike the activities of the ventriloquist’s homicidal dummy in Dead of Night, glimpsed on a TV screen at one point during this film, the frights from these inanimate playthings seem more silly than sinister.

Rosenberg makes no bones about employing the tawdriest of tactics. As Rachel’s hysteria escalates, she is visited by Thomas’ spirit, which seems intent on forcing her to join him in a watery death. Suddenly she awakens: the preceding moments are revealed as her nightmare. Immediately she is aware again of Thomas’ presence, before again waking up. Then we hear the tell-tale sound of Thomas’ breath once more… It feels as if the foundations for a devilish Shyamalan-esque twist are being laid (one of Rachel’s bestsellers has the teasing title ‘Dreamers Awake’) and for a gloriously ridiculous instant we half expect the film to get swallowed up by an unending succession of Russian-doll realities. Damagingly, this cheap-shot mise en abîme makes us laugh when we should be scared and undermines our belief in Half Light’s remaining horror set-pieces.

The director, whose only previous film is the 1996 rom-com Hotel de Love, handles the affair between Rachel and Angus just as ineffectively. Yet sequences of the couple riding horses together on the beach, making love by a fireside and sending Morse-coded messages to each other from their respective windows do lend the film an endearingly unabashed corniness. This reaches an almost operatic apotheosis when the lovers ascend to the top of the lighthouse, the camera swooningly following them up and up before pulling back to frame them against the seascape as the orchestra crescendoes. Dizzying in its kitschy grandeur, such soapy audacity makes Half Light shine more brightly than it might have done, but will also probably leave you with toes to uncurl.

This review appears in the August 2006 issue of Sight & Sound.