The Iris Effect

My mother saw the movie before I did. And she told me to see it and try to solve some doubts she had about the movie. I saw it and really got confused during the movie, but I don't know if it's just me, but I'm really fond of this kind of movie that you get really confused , don't understand, but that in the end everything makes senses.....Plus it leaves in the air something with reincarnation, which in my opinion is a great topic.....moreover there's no exact end scene to the movie, there's no end at all.....it solely ends......just when you're trying to puzzle all the facts in your head. I don't know, this movie made me recall that one BIRTH in which the main actress is Nicole Kidman.... Despite in that one the love of her life was to had being born in the body of a boy. In this one there's also a boy but it's her son, and she's not aware of his death.

As the old Polish proverb goes: "The greatest love is a mother's, then a dog's, then a sweetheart's."

In the history of storytelling, what greater motivation is there for a protagonist than the maternal drive? Very few films have delved into this territory, but a few great ones to check out are "The Changeling" (Angelina Jolie) and "The Others" (Nicole Kidman). Dog protagonists, unfortunately, get even fewer films, but for that you might want to check out Lasse Hallström's "Hachi" (2009).

Here in "The Iris Effect" we get a strong maternal thriller--probably more so than the others I mentioned--which sets the stage for a deeply emotional story. Plot summary: a mother who has been obsessively searching for her runaway son for over a decade, ends up in Russia where she thinks she recognizes his paintings in an art gallery. Strange things start happening, pushing the limits of her sanity which is already pushed to the limit by her decade long delusional obsession. Is she seeing supernatural visions, or is she just plain nuts?

The setup is magnificent because we instantly recognize and accept her obsessive motivation, even though it has ruined her life, and everyone including her therapist is telling her that she's crazy to keep at it. The "crazy" angle also figures in wonderfully as she starts having hallucinations that blur the line between delusion, reality and the supernatural.

What follows is an intriguing breadcrumb trail of a mystery that requires some patience and intelligence to figure out. This isn't a simple "oh he's hiding in Russia" story, and it isn't a linear "run from the bad guys" type thriller either, but it's a complex interweaving of stories that involve a creepy art curator (the sultry Mia Kurshner), the director of a lunatic asylum (Gregory Hlady), and a suicidal young woman who knows something she's not telling (Agnes Bruckner). The performances are very nuanced; there aren't any big melodramatic freakouts like we've come to expect from Hollywood flicks. This production is a Russian-American collaboration with a distinctly somber European air. Yet each actor has a chance to shine in their own moment of reckoning (don't miss Mia Kurshner's scene, it's amazing).

This brings me to the lead: Anne Archer whom we may recognize as the tortured wife in "Fatal Attraction" (1987) where she earned an Academy Award nomination. Here she nails the mother role perfectly, with sentimentality as well as that fierce maternal drive which makes the audience take her seriously even though none of the characters in the film seem to. But despite being gaslit from all directions, Anne's character never wavers from her purpose. And that's where the interesting part comes in:

She never doubts her quest, making her a strong heroic figure driving the story foreward, but internally she doubts her past actions and is consumed by guilt and regret over losing her son in the first place. This is what gives the film color. It's a very psychological thriller in the sense that it all hinges on what's going on inside the protagonist's mind. The story itself is very interesting with some surprising twists & revelations, but don't expect shootouts and car chases because it's not that kind of thriller.

Gorgeously lit and shot amid the imposing, otherworldly architecture of St. Petersburg, this film won't necessarily make you spill your popcorn, but the cinematic eye candy alone is worth the price of admission. Go into this with no expectations other than experiencing a deeply human story and you won't be disappointed.

At the moment when I write this review The Iris Effect has one of the worst rankings I've ever seen on IMDb - 2.2.

When seeing such a ranking it's more likely that a person turns a channel. However, I (can't explain why, maybe because my wife didn't want to watch shooting and fighting that had been offered on other channels) decided to give it a chance.

And I didn't regret it. No, I don't say that I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I was maybe more disappointed than the other reviewers. Not because the whole movie was bad, but because it was so good in some points and what was bad was so bad that it ruined everything. So much wasted, so much spoiled.

The story was not that bad as some comments accuse the writers. If you like stories on the edge of supernatural there is no reason not to like this one. Some great borderline horrors and some great love stories have been made using some premises just beyond reality, from Don't Look Back and Milagro to Angel-A and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and with no real chance to ever be challenged let alone beaten Marianne de ma jeunesse. If you want to keep your head clean and don't expect anything except pure reality, you simply must stay away from these movies and won't be disappointed. But if you accept this playing on the edge of some different kind of existence than you can buy the plot of Iris Effect.

Some flashbacks that appear within the movie are rather clearly marked being mostly b-w, some nightmares are not marked but you understand that it was a vision or hallucination at the moment it stops. So this won't disable your ability to follow the plot. Unfortunately, the bad editing in some scenes and even more bad directing make certain scenes hard to understand, and though everything is mostly revealed at the end you still won't be sure what (and why) happened then. If it was for the bad screenplay the director could help it, but it seems that the director couldn't handle the script in his hands.

The best thing that the director did was to give open hands to director of photography. Not just for creating mood virtuosically using the old streets and buildings of Sankt Petersburg, but for many other moments, pictures, colors as well. Some of these photographic solutions create by far more magic, more suspense, more feelings and more supernatural romance than anything director did in the rest of that hour and half.

Alas, the directing was still not the worst thing in the movie. It was acting, maybe the worse acting that I've ever seen in a mainstream movie made in any country that produces more than five movies per decade. Their acting could be best describes as a torture, and though I mean primarily they've tortured us, I can't get rid of the feeling that the actors felt tortured as well. Have they realized that the movie is going to be a failure? Or have they been pressed by their agents to do it, with not a grain of their own free will? The words that they've been saying have sounded less realistic than you can hear on primary school kids performance. They had to say it, but they gave not a bit of soul in it.

It was a pleasant surprise that Americans talked English and Russians talked Russian (unlike most modern movies where everybody talks English including aliens), but the way these actors talked was worse than usual dubbing (have you ever heard dubbing made for Russian or Polish audience?). Kip Pardue had a great opportunity, because his character could be (because of the plot) the most interesting, but he acted as if he was afraid to reveal some secrets too soon. Gregory Hlady was unconvincing as a psychiatrist, as a lover and no more convincing as a Rebecca's secret accomplice. Agnes Bruckner didn't get enough footage, but at least she had from the first appearance let us know there is something secret about her and make us wonder what it is. It's weird how did Russians let some of their characters who were supposed to be officials (and represent the country) like detective Kateuzov (but not just him) look completely ridiculous like caricatures, something we could expect that Americans would do making fun and deriding people from some distant third world country.

And finally, there's Ann Archer. I believe there are several million women around the world that would do this job better. All I'll say is that if she were such a wife to Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, it would be more than than normal for him to commit not only adultery but to assist Glenn Close in murdering her as well. And we'd support him if he did it.

Now I have to conclude it by something that I've never thought I'd ever write. I have been opposing making remakes from the first moment I've understood that they exist, but now, I wish that among so many not only unnecessary but adverse, noxious, absurd remakes that Hollywood permanently produces somebody remembers The Iris Effect and brushes its screenplay just a little, and then gives it a chance with new director and actors that won't even remind us to the team that made it in 2005.

In Los Angeles, Dr. Sarah Hathaway (Anne Archer) hired private eyes trying to find her missing son, the painter Thomas, who ran away from their home ten years ago after a quarrel with her. She finds a clue in a catalog of a panting exhibition in San Petersburg and she decides to travel alone to Russia to search for Thomas. Once there, she is not able to locate him and she has a nervous breakdown, but with the support of Dr. Ivan (Gregory Hlady) and helped by a street boy, she discloses what happened with her son.

Today I have seen "The Iris Effect", but unfortunately my last movie of 2005 could not be worse. I was attracted by the beautiful places in San Petersburg and a promising summary on the cover of the DVD, but the story has an awful flawed screenplay and development of the characters being almost surrealist so absurd and incredible it is. I really hated this movie and I do not recommend it to anybody. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "A Busca" ("The Search")

Have you ever seen a movie set in a foreign country and felt the impulse to book a flight there immediately? The Iris Effect had this effect on me. The images in this film, of Saint Petersburg, are spell-binding, to say the least. I felt immediately drawn to the mysterious, shadowy, plaintive tones that Irek Hartowicz's masterful photography captures of SP. Unfortunately, the film is otherwise an embarrassment. The script is uninspired, the acting, especially Anne Archer's performance, a sheer anguish, and the denouement absurd. I feel certain that Lebedev was thinking of Don't Look Now when he made this film, and he manages to create a similar atmosphere in The Iris Effect by thwarting at every turn the mother's attempts to uncover the truth regarding the fate of her son. But you can't make a film about a supposedly accomplished artist who has been missing for ten years and whose disappearance, following a fight with his mother, is linked to his quest for self-discovery and artistic glory, if the art he made is of the quality you might find, at best, at Pier One. The director also fails to develop the obvious iris/ iris metaphor--for some silly reason, I kept waiting for the director to do something with this, even though I knew, a minute into the film, that we were already scraping cinematic rock- bottom and that I could probably swim the length of the Gulf of Finland before anything momentous happened.