Blackwater Lane Review: Mystery That Falls Flat
Streaming Movie Review - Mystery/Thriller - Peacock/VOD
There are a few reasons that people like mysteries. They want to see if they can figure out what’s going on, and they also enjoy the feeling of something having a nice wrap-up at the end. There is a kind of comfort that can come from even a predictable mystery. In Jeff Celentano’s new film Blackwater Lane, now streaming on Peacock and coming to VOD in the UK, that comfort has been teased, but it is not delivered.
Cass (Minka Kelly) has been struggling since her mother’s death due to early-onset Alzheimer’s. She feels like she is coming unmoored, and that is accelerated when she sees a car pulled over on the side of the road and realizes the next day that the woman driving it was murdered. Cass tries to find comfort from her husband Matthew (Dermot Mulroney) and her friend Rachel (Maggie Grace), but as the investigation intensifies, she begins losing track of what is happening. Snippets of time continue to pass without her memory, and Cass begins to wonder if her experiences are supernatural or if she is headed down the same path as her mother.
While I’m not sure that Blackwater Lane was ever going to be a top-tier movie, the basic premise is interesting enough that it should be a decent streaming film. But Elizabeth Fowler’s adaptation of the B.A. Paris novel “The Break Down” is so clumsy that any sense of mystery or intrigue that exists is drowned out by inconsistent and ludicrous storytelling and expository dialogue.
The performances are definitely what save this movie from a complete evisceration. Kelly does an admirable job of raising questions about her mental acuity, providing some of the only actual tension in the film. Grace could have deserved more screen time, but the script would have likely made that more awkward, so perhaps it’s better that her time was limited. Mulroney was good, even if his performance telegraphed where things were headed a little too loudly.
Undoubtedly, what hurts Blackwater Lane is the absurdity of the script. There are so many wholly inscrutable things that occur as the story unfolds, but they have to be that way, or else the entire end would be given away. Unfortunately, instead of it being a mystery, it just feels confused, which is then explained via voiceover in one of the most poorly conceived endings to a film that I have watched in a while. In a movie that highlights gaslighting, the end spends its final moments gaslighting the audience into believing that what we just saw was somehow actually the opposite.
I can appreciate the desire to watch a mystery movie that is just straightforward and easily digestible. There’s a lot going on, and the need for simple, entertaining media is legitimate. But Blackwater Lane is far more frustrating than it is entertaining. Every film doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, but it should at least be internally consistent, and this movie is not.
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on January 25, 2025.