Lost Souls movie review & film summary (2000)

It is revealed during the exorcism that the devil will appear soon in human form. Ryder comes away with pages of numbers from the possessed man--long legal pads of figures. Smoking lots of cigarettes, she massages the encryption until she breaks it. As nearly as I could tell, looking over her shoulder, every number stood for a letter of the alphabet. When I was a kid I had a Lone Ranger decoder ring that could have saved her a lot of trouble.

What the message tells her is that Peter Kelson (Ben Chaplin), a best-selling author of true crime books, will be reborn on his 33th birthday as the antichrist. Maya tries to warn Peter, who at first thinks she's a nut and then, after a series of strange events and revelations, decides she may very well be right. There's lots of stuff about being born in incest, and blood types that don't match, and dreams in which he sees the letters XES. He's slow to catch on, he admits, when it's pointed out that XES is "sex" spelled backward. And that's not all. Those are also the Greek letters for 600, 60 and 6, a psychic tells him, and that spells 666--the mark of Satan.

These events and others are related in a downbeat, intense, gloomy narrative that seems better suited to a different kind of story. Even the shock moments are somewhat muted, as if the movie is reluctant to 'fess up to its thriller origins. The director is Janusz Kaminski, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer ("Schindler's List," "Saving Private Ryan"), and he and his cinematographer, Mauro Fiore, create a masterful look for the film--denatured blues and browns, filmed in shadow with lots of backlighting and a certain dreaminess around the edges.

The performers are convincing in the moment, even if the arc lets them down. Ryder, always able to suggest intelligence, also hints at the terrors of a child whose parents were murdered. Chaplin perhaps doesn't take his impending transformation urgently enough, but what would you do? The priests, including not only John Hurt with his sorrowful eyes but also Philip Baker Hall with his underpriced charm, are convincing as spiritual pros--when an exorcism team goes on assignment, the camera is low-angle to show the thick-soled black business shoes beneath their cassocks.

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