There is an old-fashioned feel about the latest offering from the vast X-Files body of work.
A serial killer collects terrified girls and keeps them in boxes. What is this? 1991?
The dark time when TV and film offered endless variations on the helpless girl/keeper theme? It was a rich storyline to mine, but after a decade and overkill, the serial killer took a hike, making way for the superhero and ironic teenager.
X-Files in its umpteenth incarnation, stays close to its own formula while borrowing from the great pantheon of evildoers like Hannibal, Buffalo Bill and their brethren. I Want to Believe is a nostalgia trip on every level. There’s a weird kind of comfort in the familiarity, but the surprises add the drama we crave.
So years après la deluge, the grim ‘he’ is back, this time in the form of fine Canadian actor Callum Keith Rennie, as a Russian thug who carries a big lunch chiller everywhere he goes.
The film’s most interesting aspect is its focus on Christian spirituality. Does God speak to us through extra sensory perceptions? Scully knows the scriptures, Mulder wants to believe, the characters include priests with evil taint, and sinners involved in holy work. That’s the film’s powerful theme – where is God and how do we relate to Him?
Why does Mulder struggle with his faith? Why is Scully faithful?
It’s good to see big and small tributes to the series’ glorious past.
Sully’s camel hair reefer coat and Mulder’s wiseass humour are as iconic as ever. The references to past episodes and cases bring back the reasons we loved the X-Files in the beginning.
It’s hard to take Billy Connolly as the pedophile, seer and priest Father Joe. I can hardly look at him without remembering how he once told me the cure for head lice – ‘pour whiskey and sand on your head, they get pissed and stone each other to death!’ See what I mean?
Nevertheless, he is a powerful symbol of duality, doing what God tells him to do, that is, protecting society from threats through his extra sensory perception. He is guilt ridden, desperate for peace and yet still a risk. Interesting!
Scully, now a doctor at a Catholic hospital is approached by FBI agents who require Mulder’s special knowledge in matters of ESP. They are willing to drop charges against him if he will heed their call. He is holed up in a ramshackle house filled with memorabilia of past cases, still passionate about his science, but refusing to help his former bosses.
She convinces him not to give up, he insists that she join him and step back into their past to solve a missing persons case.
Rural Virginia, actually the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, offers a snowy backdrop, with lots of inky night scenes and omnipresent natural threat. Fabulously creepy, in vintage X-Files style. Fear lingers around every corner, aided and abetted by Mark Snow’s eerie score.
Read an interview and features or access stills from the movie .
35mm mystery sci fi drama
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