My Soul to Take Review
By Lora Grady
Soul'd Out
"My Soul to Take" is being promoted as "Wes Craven's return to movie-making", as it is the first full-length film Mr. Craven has both written and directed since 1991's "The People Under the Stairs". It would be marvelous to say that this is a triumphant homecoming to the genre that made the venerable horror-meister famous. Unfortunately, "Soul" is a disappointing, muddled mess.
The framework of the story deals with seven teenagers who were all born the same night that a serial killer was discovered in their town of Riverton, MA and killed in a police shootout. Or was he? The question of the killer's demise is the first of many that the film leaves open. In a tighter screenplay this would potentially work to heighten the suspense of the story, but here it just comes across as bad writing.
Apparently, the teens in question (referred to as the "Riverton Seven") have been gathering every year on their birthday and enacting a weird rite where they vanquish a puppet version of the killer (known, predictably, as the "Riverton Ripper") in order to keep the real killer from coming back and fulfilling his threat to murder them all. This particular year, on the occasion of the group's 16th birthday, the teen chosen to take on the killer puppet is Adam, a.k.a. Bug (Why the nickname? The film never tells us.) He doesn't complete the ritual, and one by one his peers start to be killed off in a series of gruesome murders. To boot, Bug keeps having visions of his dead friends. Could this mean that he is the killer? Is the Riverton Ripper finding some way to work through him? These questions do get answered, but the lead up to these answers is so confusing that it's hard to care.
"My Soul to Take" is a strange hybrid: an ultra-simple, by-the-book murder mystery with an overlay of angsty teen drama, and a handful of mysticism sprinkled on top. None of these disparate elements fuse well together. The film shifts gears so many times that the viewer is left wondering if whole pages of the script were simply dropped out of the final production. Exposition is delivered ham-handedly, in the form of lengthy monologues (one of the Riverton Seven gives an endless speech setting up the puppet ritual and its history), or "surprise" reveals that only add to the confusion because the information appears to come out of nowhere (an unexpected sibling relationship is revealed in the third act; a secondary character confesses to a murder that took place entirely off-screen). Rather than providing a strong focus and propelling the story forward, the main character, Bug, always seems to be two steps behind in the process of solving the mystery. And the script can't seem to decide how it wants to portray Bug: one character tells him, "You were our (i.e., the town's) hope, our guiding light", while another one says, "I defended you when everyone was calling you a ticking time-bomb". OK, which one is it??
There is some attempt made to bring depth to the story by connecting the Riverton Seven to various spiritual beliefs about multiple souls being intertwined. The script flirts with Haitian and Native American mythology tying together birds and souls, but it never goes into any depth. There is a moment when Bug hears the voice of the killer in his head, whispering, "What happened to your angel wings?" and we see in later shots that there are twin wounds on Bug's back, as though a pair of wings has been severed. It's potentially evocative, but it's absolutely unrelated to anything that has taken place thus far in the film, and thus just adds to the overall confusion.
It is worth noting that the multi-talented Raul Esparza (three time Tony award nominee; co-star of the 2008 production of "Speed the Plow" that Jeremy Piven departed due to mercury poisoning) and veteran character actor Harris Yulin (credits too numerous to list) play smaller-than-expected roles at the beginning of the film. Seeing such heavy hitters turn up in such brief roles leads one to wonder if more substantial footage was shot and then left behind in the editing room. If that is the case for the film overall, Mr. Craven and his team would have been wise to forgo the 3D process entirely, and concentrate instead on adding depth to their film by constructing a story that plays fair with the audience by using every available component to produce a coherent, compelling story.
