Solace (2015)

Solace arrives with the weary dignity of a film that spent years in a cupboard, and it shows. Originally conceived as a sequel to Se7en, tentatively titled Ei8ht, before David Fincher declined the honor, the project drifted through studios and directors until Afonso Poyart finally got it made in Atlanta. Anthony Hopkins plays John Clancy, a psychic physician coaxed out of seclusion by an FBI agent (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to hunt a killer who shares his gift. Colin Farrell's Charles Ambrose is that killer. The premise is sturdy. The execution is not, and the reviews were unkind, though the chemistry between Hopkins and Farrell gives the thing a faint pulse.

The film does entertain an argument. Ambrose kills the terminally ill out of what he calls mercy, and Clancy answers that no one has the right to steal remaining time from the dying, however brief. This is moralizing, but it is the moralizing of a thriller, subordinate to subway confrontations and visions of blood. Abbie Cornish's Dr. Cowles is a capable criminal psychologist, and she is also a surrogate daughter for Clancy, which is the sort of role the genre assigns to its women with grim reliability. The film makes no case for anything beyond its own plot.

On the cultural ledger, the account is nearly blank. The cast is white and male at its center. Race, sexuality, class, and ecology go unmentioned, and the supernatural gift at the heart of the story is treated as a gift, not a diagnosis. What remains is a competently mounted, thoroughly forgotten thriller, the kind that fills a streaming queue and evaporates on contact.