The Killer's Mirror

High school kids have to deal with a serial killer and their own hidden connexions to him in 2010's My Soul to Take. The last film to be both written and directed by Wes Craven (Scream 4 was his last film as director), it seems clearly intended to be his magnum opus, like he was just throwing everything he could into the pot. I kind of loved it but it's honestly a train wreck.

The influence of Lost Highway is pretty obvious right from the start. We meet a man working on a hobby horse in the basement who hears a news story about a local serial killer with a distinctive knife. Almost immediately, he trips over that very knife and is confused by the familiar way he picks it up and puts it in his pocket. This is all part of a rapidly told prologue segment that ends with the killer apparently meeting his end--but of course he didn't really.

Sixteen years later, seven high school kids who were born at the time of the killer's death supposedly somehow inherited aspects of his personality or are just considered cursed. The dialogue has lots of references to identity and how identity is defined. The main character, Bug (Max Thieriot), for instance, has some amusing dialogue with his best friend, Alex (John Magaro), about how being a man means pretending to enjoy pain and that being a man is entirely defined by pretense.

Where the departures from plain logic in Lost Highway always work as possible delusions of the protagonist, there are many lose threads left in My Soul to Take that just feel like sloppiness, particularly the many little suggestions that Bug has killed people and his memories have somehow been repressed. The movie totally forgets to explain or follow up on that. I kind of liked, though, how Craven doggedly avoided a lot of exposition, leading to a sometimes bewildering experience, as in one scene late in the film when we suddenly learn two characters had been siblings all along and it wasn't even a secret.

For all its faults, the movie has a sense of an artistic identity you don't often see in movies anymore. It definitely has the distinct flavour of Wes Craven.