Incarnate

Incarnate may be rubbish, but it's not boring.  It's a mix of ideas looking for structure.  According to this movie, an Incarnate is someone who can enter the mind of another person, and remove a demon that happens to be possessing them.  That alone is an amazing thing, and if the movie had actually explored this idea, we would have one heck of a movie.  Instead, we get a not at all scary or even remotely suspenseful paranormal thriller, with a few interesting ideas tossed in.

Aaron Eckhart stars as Dr. Seth Ember, an Incarnate who offers his services to help people who are under demonic possession.  In reality, he's after one demon in particular.  This demon, named Maggie, is not only responsible for the car accident that has since left him crippled and in a wheelchair, but that same accident took the life of his wife and 11-year-old son.  He's been tracking Maggie down for years, and finally finds her possessing the body of a young boy named Cameron (David Mazouz from TV's Gotham).  Cameron had been living alone with his mother (Carice Van Houten), trying to outrun his abusive father, when a homeless person possessed by the demonic Maggie broke into their apartment and took control of the boy's body.  His mother contacted the Catholic church, and when none of their priests could do anything, they called on Seth.

There's a lot of pseudo-science talk that tries to explain what Seth does to enter someone's mind.  At one point, the dialogue even compares the human soul to a Wi-Fi area.  None of it makes a lick of sense, but the actors put on game faces, and pretend that this is serious business.  Eckhart plays Dr. Ember as a brooding and broken down hero, but we get the sense he had a hard time stifling his laughter during some scenes.  The demon-possessed Cameron sits in the middle of his room, speaking in a low, growling voice, challenging Seth to enter the boy's mind and confront her.  Seth must enter Cameron's brain, where the boy is trapped in a fantasy tranquil existence with his father.  In order to draw the kid away from the monster posing as his dad, Seth must try to shatter the world of illusion the boy is trapped in, and get him to return to the real world.

Even if the idea of entering someone's mind is derivative of other films such as Inception, at least it keeps Incarnate from becoming a routine exorcism movie.  But it's not enough to liven what is essentially a movie with no thrills whatsoever.  The main hurdle is that it's just not scary, and it's never able to create a sense of tension or dread.  Even when young Cameron's life is hanging in the balance, and the demons of hell are chasing our hero down, we're just not enthralled due to the fairly lifeless direction by Brad Peyton, who never generates any atmosphere with his images.  There are some ideas here in the script that are obviously trying to break free, but the workmanlike direction and storytelling (which hints at nearly every reveal that is to come early on, so there are no surprises) hold back any interest.

Still, this is not the worst thriller I've sat through this year, and the performances are a lot better than the material probably deserves.  Even if I wasn't exactly engaged by what was happening, I was still kind of interested in its ideas.  This is a movie that either needed to be a lot better, or a lot worse, so we could have laughed at how inept the movie was.  Instead, it's the kind of movie you likely forget about less than a week after watching it.

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