Vanishing on 7th Street (R) ★

Brad Anderson's new film The Vanishing on 7th St. asks you to fear the haunting abyss that is the darkness, but the more terrifying void is its story. Or lack thereof. Seeing as how it's billed as a mystery horror-thriller, and this from the director of neo-noir classics like The Machinist and Transsiberian, I expected at least a few minor scares; I should've known they'd come only from Hayden Christensen's performance.

The film is set in Detroit and follows a handful of survivors (including John Leguizamo, Thandie Newton, Jacob Latimore and Christensen) of an inexplicable power outage that seems to have consumed the entire city's population. They must put the pieces of this puzzling event together to understand what's happening and figure out how they can stay alive with looming shadows closing in on them.

With a less competent director at the helm, this movie would've been a total disaster. The script is terrible, focusing on one-dimensional characters, their back-stories and a bunch of crackpot theories that hint at explanations but never follow through (in its defense, the film is meant to be inconclusive, but that doesn't make up for bad dialogue, plot holes, etc.) Luckily, Anderson is in his element with ambiguous narratives and creates a startling atmosphere that is interesting to examine. It has an unpolished, gritty texture that brings to mind similar low-budget horror flicks, but is enhanced by startling sound effects and an unnerving score from relative newcomer Lucas Vidal. Still, all style and no substance only goes so far, and The Vanishing on 7th St. never hits the throttle.

Essentially a creature feature without the creature, the film is best looked at as an apocalyptic survival tale. The problem is that there's nothing adventurous or enthralling about it. The characters' encounters with the shadows are repetitive and the effect gets old quickly. Furthermore, half of the cast (I'll let you guess who) is incapable of conveying fear, and if they aren't afraid then how are you, the audience, supposed to be? I tried analyzing the film from an existential standpoint, as a few of the characters question the reason for this human extermination, but I couldn't find any genuine moments of meditation.

Without question, the star player here is Anderson, who proves that he can do his job even when other members of the creative team don't. The fact that he was able to develop such a striking tone from a sub-par screenplay is a testament of his ability as a storyteller.

Hollywood.com rated this film 1 star.