Fallen
Warner Bros., 1998
Directed by Gregory Hoblit

$$$

A touch, a brush against your shoulder or the slightest contact with another person, and suddenly you're infected with the soul of a demon straight from hell. That, in a nutshell, is the premise at the heart of Fallen, a clever, engrossing supernatural mystery thriller that attempts to do no less than explain the root of all evil on earth.

The movie plays very much like an X-Files episode, minus Mulder and Scully. Instead, we get Denzel Washington as John Hobbes, a homicide detective working the cobblestone streets of the City of Brotherly Love. As the film opens, he's caught a serial killer named Reese (Elias Koteas -- a dead ringer for a young DeNiro) who's sent to the gas chamber. Before gasping his last breaths, Reese starts singing the 1964 Rolling Stones hit "Time is on My Side". It's a creepy moment filled with twisted irony. And, like another sick joke, murders similar to the ones committed by Reese continue even after the execution. Stranger still, it seems a lot of people are suddenly going around singing that Stones song. As Hobbes digs deeper, he discovers that the killer may die, but the soul lives on. Turns out the murderous spirit is passed on from person to person by a simple touch.

Director Gregory Hoblit does a good job pulling off this intensely paranoid premise. (With this film and the 1996 Richard Gere/Edward Norton film Primal Fear already to his credit, Hoblit is proving himself to be very effective at maintaining suspense and surprising his audiences.) Through simple subjective camera work he manages to show us an invisible spirit moving from body to body, without ever confusing viewers. That's no easy trick. He also does an interesting job of exploring the nature of evil. Here, evil is a disease that infects society, lurking beneath its surface. We're all good, says the movie, but evil could infect any of us, bringing out the worst in us at any time.

John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, Embeth Davidtz and James Gandolfini provide a solid supporting cast.

The film builds up to a satisfying and unconventional ending. There are a few holes in the logic (to explain further would give too much away), but the film is so original, that its faults are easily forgiven.

(c) Copyright 1999