An "ordinary" man, moderately depressed about it, submits to an unskilled hypnotist for the sake of a party game ("What's the worst that can happen?"), and takes all too literally a posthypnotic suggestion to be more "open-minded." The 1958 Richard Matheson novel, with its ingenious blend of ingredients of science fiction, ghost story, and detective novel, was made-to-order for the screen; and the prose was scarcely of a standard to trouble anybody about what would be lost in transition. The problem, as it unfolds, is not what has been lost, but what has been added. Writer-director David Koepp has actually improved on the business of the kidnapping babysitter (the excellent Liza Weil, of Whatever), with some graspable motivation and a whole new mystery subplot. (Showing the babysitter passing the time with a copy of Matheson's The Shrinking Man is an addition of no significance.) The sketching-in, however, of a sort of secret society of "receivers," a club to which the hero's own son would qualify for membership (what a coincidence!), gets us nowhere. The initial manifestation of it -- the voodoo-eyed cop cornering the hero's wife in a graveyard -- is pretty exciting, but it's simply irritating that the wife afterwards never shares the information with her suffering husband. This irritation is far surpassed by the hero's sudden unexplained mania for digging -- in his yard, under his floors, beneath the basement. (He's a renter, let it be noted, not the owner.) Enough, though, has been retained of the original novel to warrant a recommendation; and the best of the thrills are not cheap. Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Illeana Douglas, Kevin Dunn. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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