Long on atmosphere, but short on depth and, alas, never frightening. Set in Detroit, the film concerns a small group of people, including an unfaithful TV journalist (Hayden Christensen), a physical therapist (Thandie Newton), and a movie-theatre projectionist (John Leguizamo), fighting to survive after a rapture-esque event. They are haunted by mysterious, light-averse shadows. Demons? Spirits? There are also several references to the 117 pioneers who vanished on Roanoke Island in 1590.

Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Transsiberian) is a talented director, and he doesn't 100 percent drop the ball here. The action/horror sequences, with their oppressive shadows and subtle supernatural movements, are well-shot and often exciting, but the scenes between them are hard to endure. The characters are thin (near impossible to invest in), and the performances are mediocre. The pace is sluggish. The ending is unsatisfying. The film could have used a shot of humor, even of the gallows variety. The tone is dead serious, and Anderson seems to be flirting with to-believe-or-not-to-believe religious themes, though he never commits to them. Overall, Vanishing on 7th Street is without a doubt the worst film of the young director's otherwise promising career.

C

It's Alan Wake: The Movie, right down to the one-tone 'score' and hazy atmosphere. Unfortunately, that also means it's shallow, boring, and repetitive.

Also, I couldn't get past the fact that the Roanoke 'mystery' isn't much of a mystery at all, and so any attempt to use it to invoke feelings of supernatural dread were wasted on me.

Vanishing on 7th Street

I think this was an ambitious project gone wrong. I was left frustrated by the lack of an explanation rather than compelled. The film created a good atmosphere, but it's not scary at all besides the rare glimpses of a shadow on a wall.

Why didn't any of the survivors think to set fire to a building to keep light? Buildings that catch fire sometimes stay alight for days. I bet the arsonists of 7th Street didn't die. I thought Hayden Christensen was good, and I was shocked when he died, but not too shocked because Thandie Newton had died only minutes earlier so I knew we were in named-stars-die territory. I didn't like how the kids both survived. The filmmakers chickened out on that one.

C-

lol, good line.