The Skeptic (2009) - 3/4

After the first twenty minutes of The Skeptic, I said to myself, "I know everything that will happen in the film from this point on, so why keep watching?" I kept watching because it's a horror film and there's always the chance it might scare me. Surprisingly, it did and I was wrong about how the film would develop.

Bryan (Tim Daly) is a lawyer who prizes logic above all else. After years of marriage, this has finally started to bother his wife. At the same time, his aunt, who never liked him, dies and he gets her mansion. So he takes a breather from his wife by staying in the house some say is haunted. The plot thickens when his aunt's will reveals the house has been left to an ESP lab and he starts hearing and seeing things.

The skeptic-to-believer story has been done countless times in horror movies, and has been given its supreme treatment in the unjustly neglected Night of the Eagle. It's a difficult sort of story to handle, because the temptation for the writer must be to make the skeptic convert to believer too quickly. This film gets it right and does it with a twist. As a skeptic, Bryan would rather believe himself imbalanced than accept what he thinks he saw and how he behaved. By making Bryan the center of the film (the title is "The Skeptic", not "The Haunting") a certain organic unity is achieved between his psychology and the apparently supernatural events that is built in a slow and clever way. This film is not a retread, not a story you've seen countless times before, or at least not in the way it plays out. It's a clever story that goes its own way with its skeptic.

The most surprising thing about the film for me is that it scared me. I am rarely scared by a horror film, even though I quite like to be. The Skeptic scared me. It uses some of the oldest tricks in the book and they just worked this time. It also has a few tricks of its own. Starting toward the middle of the second act, I started feeling chills. There are no jump scares. It's not that kind of scary. It simply becomes chilling, the sort of chill that seeing a child crossing a dangerous highway would cause, as the mysteries of the house and the psychology of the skeptic begin to collide.

The Skeptic is at once a very surprising and yet a fairly mundane affair. It is, after all, just one of those haunted house pictures where a skeptic stays in the house a few days and is eventually converted and frightened. Maybe it was the goofy presence of Tom Arnold as Bryan's boss that kept me off guard, maybe it was the idiosyncratic paranormal investigator, maybe it was the psychology, maybe it was just that it really frightened me, maybe all of the above: but it manages to be a very good haunted house picture and a little more.

3/4