A self-assured Midwestern girl finds her confidence gradually crumbling as a barrage of terrifying visions prompt her to investigate a brutal murder in a supernatural thriller directed by Asif Kapadia and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. Joanna Mills (Gellar) is a successful sales representative for a local trucking company, and though her professional life is at an all-time high, her personal life couldn’t be any more troubling at the moment. Estranged from her father (Sam Shepard) and menacingly stalked by an obsessive ex-boyfriend (Adam Scott), Joanna feels all alone in the world as her downward spiral rapidly begins to accelerate.
When Joanna has a psychic experience in which she literally sees and feels the brutal murder of a female stranger, she soon begins to suspect that she has been targeted as the killer’s next victim. Joanna isn’t the type to go down without a fight, however, and as her increasingly vivid visions guide her ever closer to the victim’s hometown, the secrets that will be revealed leave her wondering if the murder she is investigating may be her own.
It doesn’t feel like your standard teen shocker. It’s also not a remake, but it feels more Asian than most Hollywood horror do-overs: Mellow — nay, snoozy — atmospherics trump actual scares, and it makes almost zero sense. Gellar is a screwy-headed cutter called to a small Texas town, where she is haunted by visions of a dead woman, voices that call her “Sunshine,” and — in what passes for the major goose-pimple tactic — repeated plays of Patsy Cline’s ”Sweet Dreams.”