Red Lights (2012)

Rodrigo Cortes assembles a cast of unusual pedigree for a supernatural thriller: Sigourney Weaver as a university psychologist who debunks frauds, Cillian Murphy as her physicist assistant, Robert De Niro as the blind psychic returning after thirty years of self-imposed exile. The first hour is patient and talky, a study of cold reading, planted earpieces, and the small theatrical tricks that sustain belief. Then the film loses its nerve and its footing, and the final act arrives with exploding electronics, a bathroom beating, and a twist that reframes everything we have watched.

The picture wants to argue about skepticism and faith, about whether science can account for the strange, but it never commits to a position. Cortes has said he intended only entertainment, and the film bears that out. There is no social argument here, no critique of power, no instruction for the audience on how to live. Weaver's character is a woman of authority, and the screenplay treats this as unremarkable, which it is. De Niro's psychic is a showman and a fraud, and the film judges him on those terms alone.

In the taxonomy of modern cultural markers, this one is barren. It is a genre exercise from 2012, made before the current era of explicit thematic messaging, and it carries none of that freight. There is no representation agenda, no queer subtext, no feminist critique, no racial consciousness, no environmental sermon, no class anger, no body-positive or neurodivergent advocacy, no revision of history, and no sermonizing. What it offers instead is atmosphere, a few good scenes, and a third act that squanders them. The classification is straightforward: zero across the board, a clean sheet, a film that wants to be a thriller and mostly fails at that. There is something almost restful about it.