Premonition

2007, US, directed by Mennan Yapo

Underneath the self-conscious direction and a plot that's often extremely difficult to follow - that's part of the point, I suppose - there's a surprisingly hard-edged story about a crumbling marriage, and a woman's struggle to make meaning for her life as the mainstays of her life come unmoored. It's rather a chore, though, to unearth this story, couched as it is in the framework of a confusing semi-supernatural yarn that never quite makes up its mind where to go. The film also takes itself much too seriously - there's none of the cod-Gothic genre fun of a film like The Skeleton Key, and Bullock is drained of the spunky charm that's one of her main draws (she was appealingly nasty in Crash, but that role was as much about turning her accustomed image on its head as anything else).