Odd Thomas (2013)

Odd Thomas arrives from 2013 with the mild, sheepish air of a film that has no argument to make and no intention of starting one. A short-order cook in a California desert town can see the dead, along with the invisible creatures that gather where misery is brewing. A stranger with unfortunate hair appears, a conspiracy follows, and the whole affair resolves itself in a shopping mall with gunfire and a moving van full of explosives. It is a supernatural thriller, adapted from a Dean Koontz novel, and it behaves exactly like one. Nobody stands up to explain how we ought to live.

The supporting cast includes Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Leonor Varela in modest roles, and the film treats their presence as unremarkable, which is to say it does not treat it at all. Addison Timlin's Stormy exists to believe in Odd, assist him, and die so that he may grieve. This is a girlfriend function, not a thesis. Odd's clairvoyance is a plot device, a gift from the supernatural, never a condition to be named and accommodated. There is no romance beyond the heterosexual variety, no economic grievance, no weather to worry about, no history to correct. The film has one job and it does it without moral instruction.

A pulpy, uneven curiosity is what we are left with, forgettable in its own moment and only more so now. The critical consensus was tepid and the box office was worse. Yet there is something almost admirable in a film so thoroughly unconcerned with being good for us. It offers a hero, a mystery, a sad ending, and a road to Las Vegas. It asks nothing of the audience except attention. In a crowded marketplace of sermons, that restraint registers as a small, accidental virtue.