Ian McEwan's original screenplay offers good possibilities for two separate movies—one about a 12-year-old (Elijah Wood) coping with the recent death of his mother and believing that his aunt (Wendy Crewson) is her reincarnation, the other about a 12-year-old spending time with a sadistic cousin (Macaulay Culkin) while his father is away. Unfortunately, despite the occasionally resourceful direction of Joseph Ruben (
The Stepfather), each of these promising scenarios winds up getting in the way of the other. And the casting of Culkin is less clever than it initially might have seemed: he's already been applauded for sadism and cruelty in the
Home Alone movies, so asking us to find the same qualities disturbing here seems a bit of a stretch. There's wonderful use made of a Maine port town, and Ruben gets a dizzying thrill or two out of overhead shots, but the conceptual overload finally prevents this from coming together (1993).
By
Jonathan Rosenbaum
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