Missing The Deadline

Robert Mulligan's  "The Other" is a movie that is maybe about the supernatural and maybe not.-- Roger Ebert, glands at the footstool of God, diametrically.

When the dowager checked the X-Ray Prime Video captions for Case 39, and saw that Paramount had to delay the release of the film, she presumed that delay was due to the ostensible impact on families like those of Shane and Dominique Decree. Background sources indicate this wasn’t the case, but was due to a fire on the set, which opens another set of possibilities. Maybe a member of the production crew was unhappy with the doomed straight to DVD pay scale, as evinced by the film’s critical reception. The besieged subscriber knew nothing of this upon the film’s selection, and was transfixed by the near death in the oven scene. This rather crucial opening of the plot occurs shortly after Renee Zellweger, inhabiting the overworked social worker Emily with due diligence, does the initial spot check on the stoically apathetic Sullivan family. Jodelle Ferland is adept at behaving like the ambidextrous mimic Alvart wishes her to be, as tightly wound against the slew of prepubescent possession films which vomit out of production companies with the regularity of recurring reinterpretation since The Exorcist, just an anxious little girl whose red flags don’t justify any extraordinary measures on the part of Emily’s supervisor, a diligent minority who remains untouched by Lily’s rather overwhelming onslaught of anguish, which doesn’t delay itself too long, leaving the viewer to wonder why she affected such helplessness being gassed in a standard convection oven her parents vainly seal with duct tape. Emily receives a muted cry for rescue just before this, colludes McShane into validating her urgency, and what is a purported Christian strike against a legitimate manifestation of malevolence is defeated, and then a sweetroll like Bradley Cooper puts up a brave fight against terrorizing himself to death, the facile childhood psychiatrist universally distained in horror movies. It doesn’t take much of a leap to superimpose the tragedy of the Decree sisters into this constantly churned out formula, and psychiatric diagnostic classification does indeed make allowances, in muted percentiles, for the possibility that humans are enveloped with demonic affliction. Senese offers a much sharper construct with Ethan in Closer to God, which puts a dimmer button on Shelley’s pathos involved in scientific over-reach, so why am I bothering with this almost A-list mediocrity? Because its subtext is an indictment of the childhood welfare state, rather suggestive of the fact that despite  protections, safeguards, courts, first responders, social workers, the system is overwhelmed with splintering force, allowing evil to thrive in misplaced accountability. Linda Blair’s invidious marionette, mutilating its vulva with a crucifix, was a cautionary check on feminism’s ascent. Alvart’s oven containment scene, unfortunately, wasn’t something of which we aren’t aware, in the worst and lowest aspects of domestic criminality. Had he not pivoted Ferland’s character so quickly, it might have been a notch or two above a mere brutal sensationalism.