7. Red Lights (2012)
Red Lights is one of those films that I'm still wrapping my head around. For its first two acts, Red Lights is a taut and brilliantly engaging thriller about the nature of paranormal activity, with investigator Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver), assistant Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) and student Sally Owen (Elizabeth Olsen) going about debunking so-called psychics, revealing their devious methods. Their biggest target to date is the King of the psychics, Simon Silver (a brilliantly cast Robert de Niro), a brilliant and seemingly inscrutable man who has been running rings around Matheson for years. At the end, however, it simply isn't enough for director Rodrigo Cortes to reveal the nature of Silver's deception, but he tacks on an additional twist; some of the activity we've been seeing - obviously unexplainable by deceptive means -
was caused by paranormal activity, as we come to learn through voiceover that Buckley was in fact the one with the powers, and he has spent the entire film on an unconscious search to find someone like himself. It's a clever idea, but rather bungled in terms of execution, such that it comes out rather incoherent on the other end, nearly derailing what was an otherwise remarkable film, and simply leaving many scratching their heads. It's certainly not what we expected, but the abrupt leavening of this twist fails to provide much context and merely aims to blindside the viewer.