Visions (2015)
Staci Layne Wilson
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Starring Isla Fisher, Jim Parsons, Anson Mount, Gillian Jacobs, Joanna Cassidy, Eva Longoria
Directed Kevin Greutert
Director-editor Kevin Greutert is known for directing Saw VII and Jessabelle – two movies that couldn’t be more different from one another than if they were spawned on different planets. Saw VII was a complex mishmash rife with mythology and riddled with dead bodies. Jessabelle was a straightforward family-ties ghost story taking place in the swamps of Louisiana.
Now comes his third film, Visions, which is a throwback to old school horror of the 70s (think: The Psychic, The Sentinel) with similarities to a couple of modern pregnant-women-in-peril movies like Inside and Proxy.
After being involved in a terrible car crash resulting in the death of a baby, Julia (Isla Fisher) and her husband, David (Anson Mount), decide to cash in their city chips and move out to the country to start over. Wine country, that is. The pair buys an old vineyard and starts a family. They seem to have a perfect life. But when she’s about three months pregnant, Julia starts to “see things.” No one else hears or sees these disturbances, not even David, who grows increasingly worried about Julia’s state of mind.
She was so wracked with guilt over the car accident, she’d been put on medication. Her new doctor (played by Jim Parsons) puts her on something safe for pregnant women and the visions disappear, but her sense of foreboding does not. She makes a few friends – another newly pregnant young wife (Gillian Jacobs) and a local historian (Joanna Cassidy), but she just can’t shake the notion that something is terribly wrong. Julia goes off her meds, and the visions return in full force.
According to rumors online, Visions was pushed back from a 2014 release due to bad screen test reactions. I don’t know if I saw a newer cut, but I liked the movie. It’s well acted, tightly edited, and blissfully CGI-free with good moments of suspense; and the ending pays off. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel by any means – but it doesn’t have to, for the type of thriller it is. As a pregnant-woman-in-peril movie, it (please pardon the pun) delivers.
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Film
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