Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on October 13, 2000, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Reportedly, New Line kept Lost Souls on the shelf for a year because they wanted to avoid competing with the glut of supernatural product that opened in the late summer and fall of 1999 (The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echoes, Stigmata). Unfortunately, it now comes in the wake of the rerelease of the granddaddy of all modern occult chillers, The Exorcist, and inevitably, the comparison isn’t flattering. More to the point, it serves notice that, even with the best of intentions and plenty of talented people in front of and behind the camera, this particular well of the horror genre has probably been drained dry.
In fact, only brief portions of Lost Souls directly recall the Friedkin/Blatty classic, most specifically an early sequence of lead character Maya (Winona Ryder) being exorcised (which has wisely been shorn of a levitation shot seen in publicity photos). The script by Pierce Gardner (from a story by him and Betsy Stahl), however, is a crazy quilt of story elements and subplots already seen in other contemporary devil flicks, from End of Days (one individual’s quest to save another from a cult seeking to mate that person with Satan) to Fallen (a possessed serial killer starting all the trouble, not to mention the presence of actor Elias Koteas). For every original gambit added to the mix—I especially liked a bit involving an audio tape—there’s a scene like one in which a cute little girl approaches Maya, starts talking to her sweetly and then suddenly begins speaking in threatening, demonic tones.
Despite its derivative nature, director Janusz Kaminski clearly believes in this material 1,000 percent—and that’s part of the problem. An accomplished cinematographer, he drenches the movie in mood and atmosphere, with evocative, color-drained cinematography by Mauro Fiore—but without a script compelling enough to support it, his approach comes across as overly portentous and self-important. There’s nothing wrong with taking occult material seriously, but even Friedkin and Blatty were able to vary the emotional tone and have a little fun while presenting a resolutely grim scenario.
Ryder and Ben Chaplin (as Peter Kelson, the young author targeted to incarnate the Antichrist) make the lead roles as persuasive as they can through the limitations of the material. The supporting cast, including Koteas, Sarah Wynter and old pros John Hurt and Philip Baker Hall, is solid enough, though sharp-eared film fans will be able to tell from a voiceover in the trailer which of the secondary characters will turn traitor to the forces of good. Much is made of Maya’s struggle to hold onto her faith and atheistic Peter discovering his, and while this is a worthy theme for a religious chiller, Kaminski and co. ultimately don’t illuminate it in particularly dramatic ways. Lost Souls ends up becoming one of those movies whose creators were so concerned with the subtext that they forgot to make their text compelling.
