Rodrigo Cortés’ 2012 thriller “Red Lights,” starring Cillian Murphy, Robert De Niro, Sigourney Weaver, and a pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe Elizabeth Olsen, has a very strange premise indeed. Murphy plays Tom Buckley, a physicist who works with psychology Professor Margaret Matheson (Weaver) in a college department devoted to debunking the supernatural. For them, this is a dogged and aggressive fight, and “Red Lights” presents fake psychics and bogus faith-healers as being among the world’s worst villains.
Tom and Margaret’s nemesis is Simon Silver (De Niro), a blind TV psychic who hasn’t performed for years. Silver retired years earlier after one of his critics, an avowed skeptic, mysteriously died from a heart issue. Silver, however, now plans on returning to the spotlight, spurring Tom to try and either confirm or deny his fraudulence once and for all.
Of course, Tom and Margaret don’t have such an easy time of it. You see, years earlier, Margaret had a run-in with Silver that actually made her doubt her devotion to a world without psychic powers, so she is reluctant to pursue him. Meanwhile, Olsen plays Sally Owen, a younger college student who aids Tom.
“Red Lights” was a financial bust when it debuted in theaters, only making about $14 million at the box office. To its credit, the film tries to add high stakes to what seems like a very low-stakes conceit. Sure, faith healers and phony psychics may be frauds, but it seems doubtful that anyone would make it their intellectual, emotional, and financial life’s work to debunk them (well, apart from people like Harry Houdini and avowed skeptics and atheists like the Amazing Randi and Penn Jillette).
Red Lights is about the battle between professional TV psychics and the skeptics who hate them
“Red Lights” extends the rivalry between psychics and skeptics to a conspiratorial degree. I shan’t reveal the big twists in the plot, but it appears that Simon Silver may have agents who are tasked with sabotaging his opponents’ lab equipment. The latter, you see, have cameras and specialized tools to prove that someone may be committing fraud. Silver is their White Whale, as they have never been able to sufficiently disprove his claims. Toby Jones also co-stars as Paul Shackleton, a skeptic who is wholly convinced that Silver is the real deal, and he and Margaret butt heads over whether or not either of them is correct on the matter.
Not only does “Red Lights” take place in a universe where professional skeptics have university-level money, but they have complex, widespread rivalries within their own department to boot. TV psychics, meanwhile, are either actually divine beings or super-devious liars who aim to erode the world by implanting people with false hope. In the world of “Red Lights,” nothing is worse than perpetuating a belief in the supernatural. It’s a thriller for staunch atheists.
Similarly, at one point, Tom is spotted in the audience of one of Simon Silver’s psychic exhibitions, and he’s pulled into a bathroom and roughed up by one of Silver’s thugs. It’s startling to realize that Silver actually has thugs.
The film ends on a note that undoes a lot of its previous thematic leanings. I won’t tell you what it is, other than to say it’s the kind of conclusion that will leave everyone unsatisfied. Well, provided they were wrapped up in this unusual psychic drama in the first place.
What did critics think of Red Lights?
Folks were excited about “Red Lights” back in the day, as Rodrigo Cortés was hot off his Sundance breakout film “Buried” starring Ryan Reynolds. But few people consider it one of Cillian Murphy’s best movies (much less one of his under-appreciated ones), and critics were disappointed by the thriller upon its arrival.
Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, which is the highest grade he can give a “thumbs down” picture. Ebert wrote that he loved the setup for “Red Lights” but that he was rather disappointed by the payoff. “I’d love to see a thriller that was about what ‘Red Lights’ starts to be about,” he explained, “the debunking of psychics by expert paranormal investigators. For its first two acts, the movie had me in its grip. Then it comes apart.” He went on to ponder why so many creatives have a compulsion to push their movies toward bad, action-oriented climaxes.
Alonso Duralde, writing for The Wrap, was less impressed. Describing “Red Lights” as one of the silliest movies of the year, he wrote that its well-cooked drama and poe-faced earnestness lean directly into the realm of high camp. As he put it:
“(It’s) a tale of supposed psychics and hard-bitten skeptics that’s so overwrought and underwritten and nonsensical and flat-out looneypants that I’m not sure whether you should run toward or away from any theater that happens to be screening it. Fans of all-star catastrophes are advised to see it early and often.”
Calling its cinematography (by Xavi Giménez) “hideous,” Duralde summed the film up as a “colossal fiasco.” Audiences, meanwhile, saw the “Red Lights” and dutifully stopped.
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