Movies: The Sound

It's a dumb name for a psychological thriller/horror movie. But whatever.

Rose McGowan plays Kelly Johansen, a woman whose job is to debunk hauntings. She does this through low frequency sounds, I guess? Also: how does she make any money? Do people pay her to come to their houses and do this? She's evidently written a book, and she keeps a blog or Tumblr or something, so maybe that's where the money comes from? I'm just saying, what's the going rate for someone to come to your house and tell you it's not haunted, there's just an airport nearby?

Kelly is smug and borderline unlikable, which is how we know she's going to have to go through something torturous to wipe that smugness right out of her. She gets a message that leads her to an abandoned subway station in Toronto, and she promises her husband (or is he just a boyfriend?) she'll be back in time for that night's party, which sounds (har, see what I did there?) ridiculous considering she's flying to Toronto. I don't know where they are, exactly, so maybe it's a short flight, but still.

In the cab on the way to the subway station, Kelly gets the obligatory phone call from her mother that hints that something strange and/or terrible happened on that day thirty years before. 🙄  So now we know this is definitely going to be a thing.

The cab driver tells Kelly about how he and his friends once broke into the abandoned station, but we don't get to hear what he saw. As for the abandoned station itself, it's apparently ridiculously easy to break into. There's a door leading from the working station to the closed-off one. No tools required, just walk right on in. Again: 🙄

What we get from here on in is fairly standard pseudo-horror stuff with hallucinations, etc. Christopher Lloyd appears as a ghostly maintenance man. Kelly becomes weirdly sleepy and has numerous dreams/hallucinations. Nothing very scary, however, and it's pretty obvious a lot of what she thinks is happening isn't actually happening. Also, how is she getting cell service and Internet down there?

The core of the "horror" (if it can be called that, since none of it is particularly horrific) is a girl named Emily that apparently has something to do with this 30-year anniversary that Kelly's mom called about. Kelly keeps seeing/dreaming of a little girl in a white dress with a doll, and Kelly has the ratty old doll in her duffel . . . I won't give away the ending, but I will say I wasn't wowed—or surprised, for that matter.

For a low-budget, limited-locations production, this one is produced pretty well, and there are a couple of known names starring in it. That's impressive. I just wish someone had given the script itself a bit of a lift. It's murky and soporific and could have used some stronger twists to keep it interesting.