[yasr_overall_rating]
Rose Ricard has a gift, she can see into your soul, she can discern the truth from a lie and sometimes, she can perceive the very thoughts before they are formed in your mind. She uses these gifts to complete unsolved cases but her most recent one, unwittingly opens the doors to her own past and that of her new partner, Grant Summit.
After having spent many years in prison for killing his grandfather’s murderers, Grant Summit (Isaiah Washington) is finally a free man. He is met at the prison gates by Rose Ricard (Lisa Arrindell Anderson), a woman who has a rare gift, the gift of sight. She can look into your soul and tell if you’re lying, even before you open your mouth. While visiting a friend in prison, she got to know Grant and they became friends and now that he is free, she has hired him to work security for her firm, a job that requires her to interact daily with various people, sometimes, those of questionable persuasion, as she tries to help them with their missing persons and unsolved cases.
When Abagail Landers (Angeline-Rose Troy), a wealthy socialite, enters her office one day and pleads for Rose’s help in trying to find her missing husband, Rose agrees and begins to research his disappearance, one the local police have closed, stating that no foul play was suspected and that he probably disappeared of his own free will. Naturally, Abagail refuses to believe this but the more Rose and Grant dig, the deeper into the rabbit hole they plunge. As bodies begin to pile up, one by one, Rose quickly realizes that the killer could very well be someone from her past, and she just might be next.
I love stories that deal with clairvoyants and their supernatural abilities, movies like “The Gift,” with Cate Blanchett and Keanu Reeves, and “The Conjuring,” in which these characters can take an already spooky atmosphere and go beyond it, delivering frightening and uncanny experiences. “The Sin seer” however, is nowhere in the same league. Try as it may, it succumbs to excessive melodrama that is more suited to daytime soap operas rather than that of feature-length movies.
Occasionally, we are bombarded with an overabundance of dark, ominous music, signifying that something important is about to transpire but within a matter of moments, the scene ends and we move onto another location. It’s one thing to intentionally mislead the audience from time to time but when it becomes a constant, it assumes the form of the cinematic equivalent of the boy who cried wolf and the audience stops believing that anything of merit will occur, and even if it does, it will already have lost its impact.
Isaiah Washington is the only actor who gives a worthy performance. Everyone else must have made the transition from daytime television because their characterizations always feel forced and insincere, with even the great Michael Ironside and C. Thomas Howell being wasted in glorified cameos. In the end, “The Sin Seer” feels better suited to stage rather than screen and while the film does carry an intriguing idea, sadly, it is never fully realized.
Available on DVD & Digital Video February 2nd
