The Tall Man

Pascal Laugier's The Tall Man starts out as a fairly obvious thriller, but delivers a major twist about halfway through before morphing into a strange sociological statement. Jessica Biel stars as Julia Denning, a widow and the sole nurse in Cold Rock, a decaying mining town in the Pacific Northwest where children are disappearing—snatched by the frightening titular figure. Julia copes with the residents' traumas as best she can until her own little boy is taken one night. Fortunately, Julia is able to catch up with the intruder, and in the film's major action sequence grapples with him—and his vicious dog—in a speeding truck while trying to rescue her son. But then Laugier throws a curve that undermines everything the script has laboriously laid out up until this point, slowing the narrative down to a crawl and transforming it into a weird commentary about the extraordinary measures that might be required to address domestic problems arising from socioeconomic collapse. While one can admire the effort to make something unconventional in a very tired genre, The Tall Man is a mostly listless affair, marked by highly mannered acting, woozy visuals, and an ending more likely to antagonize than satisfy viewers. Not recommended. (F. Swietek)