@thesubstream ♥'s Midnight Madness #4 - Vanishing on 7th Street

The madness continues as we talk to fans, conduct risky rush line rescues and show some love to the die-hard GACKT DEARS!

Vanishing on 7th Street is like a lot of the other smart, lowish budget genre sophistications showing at this year's Toronto Int'l Film Festival: dark, dark, dark. Like Rodrgio Cortes' Buried, Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go and Matt Reeves Americanization Let Me In, 7th Street is bleak and almost unremittingly sad and like the best of those films, viscerally scary and filled with a prolonged, othering dread.

Four characters meet in a bar, all festooned with lights: a former news anchor (Hayden Christensen), a projectionist and a nurse (John Leguizamo and Thandie Newton) and the young son of the absent bartender (Jacob Latimore).

All have survived the three days since the apocalypse, the instantaneous disappearance of almost everyone in the city. The power went out for an instant, it came back on and everyone was gone, leaving their clothes, watches and dentures lying where they once were. Something is lurking in the dark, shadows creep with oily grace and silent black sentinels look, ready to snatch anyone that wanders too far into the gloom.

Batteries are dying, the sun is moving faster and faster through the sky leaving the days shorter and shorter, and the four survivors must decide what to do before their faltering generator fails, leaving them in the dark with no protection, waiting to be taken.

It's reminiscent of a lot of Stephen King's stuff, in particular his novella "The Langoliers" in which a similar motley crew find themselves abandoned and utterly alone. But the threat in Vanishing is simultaneously more abstract and more immediately threatening: it lurks in the shadows of the pool balls on the table around which the characters confer, a constantly-present force.

It's a conceit that works when it does and not when it doesn't. It's tense from start to finish but in a wearying way, largely because Anderson and screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski refuse to supply any real explanation. The evil force in the film is just figures and whispers, and there is no "scientist" character to explain how he read a story about shadow people this is how the film logic works and blah blah blah.

It's deeply creepy and vaguely unsatisfying, but not in a way that makes the film worse, per se. Vanishing on 7th Street like Never Let Me Go and Buried is a genre film that refuses to indulge in a predictable resolution to a generic set up. The resulting film is suffused with atmosphere and creeping dread, a smart and decidedly different thriller, though one that will leave some folks unsatisfied.

Vanishing on 7th Street. The Return of Brad Anderson to MM.

Thursday, August 14th, 2003 is a date that you may not recall until I mention the word blackout. At 4:11pm that day the lights went out affecting ten million people in Ontario and fifty five million people in eight U.S. states. There was traffic chaos, fear of the unknown, was it an act of terrorism? There was fun, drinking warm beer on bar patios, free ice cream but as the night waned and I continued to walk through the darkened streets of Toronto I began to see the look of primal fear in some people eyes and it scared me. Electricity is the very life blood of our modern society and that night it had disappeared and as the darkness continued the fragility of our civilization never seemed more open, more exposed. In a word it was chilling.

Where am I going with this?

Brad Anderson returns to the midnight madness programme for the third time with his latest feature, Vanishing on 7th street.

The film starts with a world wide blackout causing most of the human race to disappear, as the days continue there are fewer daylight hours. The world is slowly plunging into darkness. The film focuses on a group of survivors, Luke (Hayden Christensen), Paul (John Leguizamo), Rosemary (Thandie Newton) and James (Jacob Latimore). This premise in the hands of director Brad Anderson has me very excited.

There is a common thread between Brad's first two midnight outings. Session 9 in 2001 and The Machinist in 2004. He is a director that is quite skilled at working with actors to achieve brilliant performances, whether it directing the great ensemble cast of Session 9 or working with Christian Bale and his remarkable transformation in The Machinist. Mr Bale last 63 pounds in a matter of months and weighed only 121 pounds. Vanishing has Mr. Anderson working with Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo once again it seems Brad and his team have put together a great cast and to watch them work with this material is what going to the movies is all about.

Here is the trailer for Vanishing on 7th Street.



Vanishing on 7th Street screens:
Sunday, Sept 12th. 11:59pm Ryerson
Monday, Sept 13th. 2:00pm AMC 2

You can purchase tickets from the official TIFF website.