My wife picked up this DVD at Blockbuster last night. It stars Demi Moore and Henry Ian Cusick (Desmond from LOST). Moore plays Rachel Carlson, a famous mystery writer who experiences a devastating loss early in the film. In the aftermath, she becomes estranged from her husband (Cusick) and blocked, so a friend sets her up with a cottage by the sea in a remote fishing village (probably Scotland, though never specified). The change of venue seems like just the ticket, but before long she’s all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. The cabin has a checkered past, and soon Rachel is doubting her sanity.
It’s not a great film, which probably explains why it went straight to DVD, but it was fun. Rachel’s husband is an editor who is also an aspiring author. As the film opens, he receives a brief but biting rejection letter. His cozy British mystery doesn’t have enough blood and guts for the publisher. He says it’s Tabitha King syndrome. Stephen King’s wife is an excellent writer, he says, but no one knows her. Everyone knows Stephen. The bit of dialog was a surprising bit of synchronicity since I’m currently working on a couple of interviews with Tabitha King.
The film has a few predictable SHOCK MOMENTS but it does a decent job of building suspense early on, and has some twists that viewers might not see coming, though I predicted one of them, sort of as a joke, part-way through the film. I laughed a couple of times, which probably wasn’t what the director was aiming for at the moment, but overall it was not terrible. It’s worth it for the British coastal scenery and the thick accents alone.
I reached the 5000-word point of my current short story, which is a bit of a problem since that’s the upper word cutoff and I still have about 800 words of story left to go. Not to worry, that’s what revisions are for. I shouldn’t have any problem cutting it back to the target length. At least I hope not. We’ll see! The story turned out to have more twists and turns than when I originally envisioned it, but at the same time it’s almost exactly what I proposed. Funny, that.
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