Horns

Horns, the second novel from acclaimed genre writer Joe Hill, is a supernatural mystery thriller starring Daniel Radcliffe as Ig Perrish, a young man falsely accused of murdering his girlfriend, who grows devilish looking horns on his head and develops strange powers that help him uncover the actual assailant. Everyone in town views Ig as an unrepentant killer that got away with murder. But the horns give Ig the power to induce people to confess to him their innermost thoughts, secrets, and sins. The nonlinear film jumps back and forth between Ig’s contemporary quest to find the real murderer of his lost love, and the flashbacks to their childhood and the events leading up to the murder. Juno Temple (Killer Joe, Jack & Diane, Afternoon Delight) plays Ig’s murdered girlfriend Merrin in the flashbacks.

This is the first feature film adapted from a Hill story and I wish I had better things to say about it (as I’m a fan of his writing), but Horns is a flawed, confused, silly movie. The script is full of ridiculously illogical situations and the tone is all over the place. Screenwriter Keith Bunin sticks close to the book’s basic narrative line, but he takes many liberties with its structure, character relationships, and overriding mood in a failed attempt to make the story more cinematically suspenseful and ironically funny. The resulting picture is hopelessly muddled; each new piece of information revealed to Ig and to the audience jibes less and less with what we came to understand previously. Audiences expecting a supernatural horror film like The Dead Zone or The Sixth Sense are in for a disappointment. Horns plays like an awkward mix of old school, nonlinear, murder mystery noir--like Mildred Pierce or The Barefoot Contessa--with the high-concept magical realism you’d find in What Women Want or Liar Liar.

Like his father Stephen King, Joe Hill writes lengthy, serpentine stories that can easily loose their hypnotic power when condensed into a the two hour running time of a typical movie. The filmmakers behind Horns don’t just abbreviate the story beyond credibility; they alter its subtext and meaning to the point where both the narrative and the themes become simpleminded and childish. The film features one of the most absurd villains in recent memory, who seems to exist only to service a completely unsatisfying plot twist (in the novel the identity of the killer is revealed in an early chapter). And while the film is always told from Ig’s perspective, we never fully relate to him the way we need to in order for the story’s principle “sympathy for the devil” aspect to work.

Radcliffe has worked hard to shed his Harry Potter image since his commitment to that series ended. It’s too bad that more of the Potter audience will probably see this sub-par turn than the terrific work he's done in the recent films Kill Your Darlings and What If.  Since the entire cast of this movie delivers uneven performances--it features some terrible acting choices by people as talented as Max Minghella (The Social Network), Heather Graham (Boogie Nights), and David Morse (The Hurt Locker)--the fault probably lies in the direction by Alexandre Aja (High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes, Piranha 3D) and his editor (who goes by the handle Baxster). As with so many Steven King adaptations, the terrific premise and themes of Hill’s story just did not make a successful transition from prose to film.