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Capsule review by Mark Dujsik

Premonition is about any or all of the following: time travel, some weird metaphysical nightmare, or a religious experience. It's a messy movie but one that at least cares enough about its central character to give her more to do than travel through time, wander through a metaphysical lapse, or have a religious awakening. The movie stars Sandra Bullock as Linda Hanson, a wife and mother of two daughters, who is told her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) has died in a car crash. She starts the grieving process only to awaken the next morning with her husband still alive. The next day, though, he's still dead, and she ends up in an asylum. The timeline fluctuates readily here, as each successive day brings her back to her life leading up to the accident only to fling her back into the grim reality of love lost. At one point, she charts out what has happened and what will happen—as much for the audience as for herself—but in spite of its convoluted and flawed construction (one daughter is fine the first day only to be injured a few days before), the movie focuses enough on the grief process to give it a minor foundation in reality. There are some cheap moments to be sure (the head of her husband's corpse rolls off at his funeral, oppressively eerie music builds to unnecessary shocks) and Peter Stormare is wasted as her psychologist, and the way the script brings in a priest (Jude Ciccolella) to explain the time flux (the universe is a vacuum for those who have lost their faith) confuses matters worse. In fact, the eventual central theme of reconciling one's faith in an entirely fatalistic universe is obnoxiously pat, but Bullock's traversing of the plains of the sorrow within the fields of time roots the movie with some sympathy.

Copyright © 2007 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved.

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