Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 24, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
There are those who say that when you’re telling an outlandish story, the fewer extraneous details you include, the easier it is to believe. Too much embellishment, and you lose the listener. That’s essentially what happens in The Mothman Prophecies, which relates a paranormal tale based on true events that supposedly took place in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia a few decades back.
The most noteworthy achievement of the film, directed by Mark Pellington and scripted by Richard Hatem from John A. Keel’s book, is its creation of a fictional protagonist and its merging of his individual story with Point Pleasant’s. Updated to the present day, the movie follows John Klein (Richard Gere), a hotshot reporter for The Washington Post who suffers the loss of his wife in a car accident. She had a split-second vision of a mothlike creature just before the crash, and leaves a book full of sketches of the apparition behind when she dies in the hospital.
Two years later, John is taking an overnight drive to an assignment in Virginia when he suddenly and mysteriously finds himself in Point Pleasant—about 400 miles out of his way. A local man (Will Patton) John seeks help from pulls a shotgun on him, insisting John has been shadowing his house, and John soon finds that the locals have been sighting the same being his wife had glimpsed. Is the Mothman real, or some kind of mass hallucination? Who is the mysterious Indrid Cold, a ghostly presence apparently haunting the town who makes odd phone calls to John? Do the strange events have anything to do with his wife’s death, and do they—as John increasingly suspects—portend an even greater catastrophe for Point Pleasant?
Pellington and Hatem answer some of these questions more satisfyingly than others. The connection between John’s own tragedy and the disaster apparently looming in Point Pleasant’s future is persuasively developed, and Gere holds the film together with his low-key, intelligent performance. As the local sheriff who’s one of the few to initially believe that something supernatural is going on, Laura Linney projects down-home smarts and likability—indeed, the small-town setting is very well-drawn (kudos to cinematographer Fred Murphy and production designer Richard Hoover) and its people presented without condescension. Patton, in particular, admirably resists his character’s opportunities for overacting.
It’s too bad, then, that the movie undercuts its own spell via overelaboration as the running time draws toward the two-hour mark. Pellington and Hatem would have done better to keep John in Point Pleasant for the duration, but instead he departs more than once for out-of-state visits with an author named Leek (get it?), played by Alan Bates, who holds information John could probably have gleaned just as easily on-line. Rather than illuminate the situation, these scenes just dissipate the tension. Pellington’s direction is chock full of creepy flourishes that amplify the tension in some scenes, and are merely distractions in others. Most crucially, the flashbacks to the Mothman visitations are shown, as often as not, from the point of view of the elusive creature rather than that of the terrified witnesses.
Despite the flashy visuals, Pellington keeps actual creature FX to a minimum, which is part of the story’s overall design. The point isn’t the Mothman, he suggests, but rather what it means to those who have seen it. Toward the end, John comes to an emotional crossroads due to his unusual experiences, and makes a choice that, in effective fashion, resolves his personal story. Of course, this being a 21st-century film, there also has to be a Big Climax, one that is impressively staged and edited for real visceral impact, even as its emotional impact is blunted by a bit of too-obvious foreshadowing around the movie’s halfway point. Here, as elsewhere in The Mothman Prophecies, Pellington and company indulge a tad too much in both showing and telling.
