A whydunit, rather than whodunit, to do with a beautiful prison psychologist (Halle Berry) who is flabbergasted to wake up in a cell herself, with no memory of having chopped up her beefy husband three days earlier, and only a fragmentary memory of having swerved into a ditch on the way home in order to avoid a bloody young blonde standing in the middle of the road and the midst of a downpour, and then bursting into flame at the touch of a hand. The blonde, if she is in any sense "real," can only be a ghost, and the psychologist and her colleagues do not believe in ghosts. But then: who fogged up the glass in her cell and finger-wrote the words "NOT ALONE" in the frost? And who carved that same message into her forearm in the shower room? (As unprurient a women-in-prison shower scene, incidentally, as you could ever wish to see, despite the participation in it of Halle Berry and Penelope Cruz.) The mounting sense of dread in the movie has little to do with any terrors that may await, and much to do with the perceived unlikelihood of a satisfactory wrap-up. ("I wouldn't look for a real-world explanation," we are warned. "It's a dream. It's a delusion.") The sunglasses-indoors style of photography fosters no confidence in the filmmaker's -- Mathieu Kassovitz's -- interest in elucidation, and indeed the predictable climax falls far short of satisfactory, being both over-obvious as far as it goes and incurious to go any farther. The appearances of the ghost, however, greatly enliven a grind-it-out plot in which the ghost proves to be all but gratuitous. Savor her for herself. With Robert Downey, Jr., Charles S. Dutton, John Carroll Lynch. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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