The Chris Brown Connection

Arctic Creek Manor

Touchstone Pictures

Release Date:

September 19, 2003

(out of 4)

The busy city-life shuffle gets to Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone at the beginning of "Cold Creek Manor." Stone, playing an accomplished career woman, is on a plane negotiating a possible promotion deal with her superior who suggests interest in sleeping with her. Before she can respond to his advances, an airplane cellular call interrupts the moment with news from her husband (Dennis Quaid) that one of their children has just been in an accident. Stone catches the next plane home to be with her recovering child. In reacting to the near tragedy, the parents decide to pack up and move out of the city.

This turns out to be an interesting movie for entirely different reasons than its intended to be. It?s not because the ramshackle manor conceals a crime that occurred in the past or that the family unit disassembles after they are run through a series of highly-stressful events (although this is certainly mildly interesting). Clichés infiltrate through this house but they are not necessarily worse than any other mainstream thriller manufactured on derivative parts. The creakiness of the plot is peculiar, quizzical yet gripping because even though the movie is built on a deck of clichés, it keeps you watching because it is done with its idiosyncratic approach.

The story fails at a conceptual level because we never believe that Quaid and Stone, two sophisticated and technology-dependent characters, would move to a small town to buy a dilapidated mansion in need of serious renovation. The bank forecloses on the previous owner and sells the property and its contents at a very discount rate. With two children aboard, it?s unreasonable to believe that they would have any time or interest in fixing up a place that needs that much work. Then it?s difficult to accept Quaid in a role where he plays a documentary filmmaker ? as an actor he doesn?t look like somebody who would fiddle around with digital cameras and editing boards. Quaid is put to better use when he plays a baseball pitcher or a big city architect.

The former homeowner Dale Massie (talk about redneck names), played by Stephen Dorff, intrudes onto their property and starts putting his nose everywhere until it becomes realized that he is a threat. When he isn?t pandered to by his friends and associates, he turns really nasty. He smacks his girlfriend (Juliette Lewis) around when she gets too lovey-dovey in public. He either beats up drunk guys in bars or seduces them into friendship. He then gets mean with Quaid?s character, by chasing him down in the dead of night, trying to swerve him off the road (he?s angry that he?s lost the house). Nobody in the world anywhere believes Quaid when he says that he is a loose canon maniac that is capable of bringing harm to his wife and children, it?s just one of those movies.

But an ordinary movie this is not. Director Mike Figgis ("Leaving Las Vegas," "Time Code"), a devout cine-intellectual, is incapable of making a conventional thriller. The cold, creaky atmosphere seethes through the house. Figgis achieves a kind of menacing claustrophobia where you?re rooting for the characters to get out of that house of hazards. The movie doesn?t overfill the deck with accidents in every plot point yet you sense the domestic danger that lurks in every moment. It?s like The Shining as directed by Werner Herzog from a Joe Eszterhas script. This movie is made for cinephiles whom are drawn to movies with interesting camera work and evocative atmosphere.

Forget the contrivances and the familiarity of its parts. The movie has the scariest trapped down the well scene since "The Ring," and although the content of the scene is nudging close to plagiarism, it gets points by making you feel that kind of terror when isolated by darkness and surrounded by grimy freezing water. If only Cold Creek Manor would have stepped a bit further in splitting the family apart by each member?s growing suspicion and distrust for each other, the movie could have transcended above its mediocre plot instead of intermittently gravitating above it. The movie does not succeed on its terms, but it?s pretty interesting as a misfire.