A batty composer, a fusty French chateau, missing children — and that old faithful, the Antichrist — add up to a whole lot of silliness in “The Sonata,” a leaden Gothic ghost story whose high-gloss imagery fails to disguise its low-energy plot.
Bedazzled or otherwise, clichés are still clichés, and this debut feature from Andrew Desmond is strewn with them. When Richard Marlowe (Rutger Hauer), a reclusive composer who disappeared mysteriously decades earlier, dies suddenly, his disgruntled daughter, Rose (Freya Tingley) — an ambitious violin prodigy — inherits his forbidding French estate. Included in the bequest is the usual creepy housekeeper (introduced in familiar jump-scare fashion), a book on Satanism, and villagers who eye her with the shifty hostility of their counterparts in many a previous horror movie. (“An American Werewolf in London” springs to mind, but feel free to choose your own example.)
Poking around Marlowe’s gloomy mansion, Rose and her long-suffering manager, Charles (Simon Abkarian), unearth the sheet music for Marlowe’s final composition: a violin sonata marked with strange annotations in scarlet ink. The same symbols appear in various locations on the property, where shadowy figures hover out of focus and a derelict chapel houses Marlowe’s nastiest secrets. At times, the film — as in its arrestingly fiery opening — seems to be straining to express ideas beyond the rote, only to be thwarted by a director who doesn’t know how to develop them or when to pick up the pace. Some scenes are positively funereal — responding to a suspicious noise, Rose takes what feels like a five-minute stroll from bathtub to hallway — while others are only fuzzily incorporated into the story. (Charles’s drinking, for instance, seems narratively redundant, unless it’s to promote the regressive notion that those who struggle with addiction are more likely to be seduced by evil.)
As the story crawls forward, Alexis Maingaud’s sometimes lovely, sometimes booming score climaxes every time there’s a sniff of the supernatural, whipping itself toward the finale. Melodramatic camera movements keep telling us where to look, and isolated sections of Rose’s body — her padding feet, her widening eyes — fill the screen. Elevating even the most humdrum effects, the Latvian cinematographer Janis Eglitis gives the movie’s wraithlike figures a spooky glamour that suggests, were we to spend more time with them, they’d be livelier company than the movie’s stars. (This is one of Hauer’s last roles (he died last year), and we barely see him.)
Required to play little more than bratty or baffled, Tingley (best known for television series like “Hemlock Grove” and “Once Upon a Time”) is most convincing when sawing on her violin. Her final close-up might be the film’s most hackneyed moment of all, proving that not only does the Devil have all the best tunes, he also has all the best shades of lipstick.
The Sonata
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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‘The Sonata’ Review: A Little Fright Music - The New York Times
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