'Hours' of 'Darkness'

As if the January weather weren't depressing enough, Hollywood picks this chilly week to push two singularly somber films to underline the seasonal gloom.

"Darkness Falls" features a cast of over-straining unknowns, some hilariously inept dialogue, a laughably selected location and some expensive special effects to try to probe our deepest, lingering, unconscious fears of primal darkness and … the tooth fairy.

The back story, unveiled in a narrated opening montage using some hauntingly simulated antique photographs, describes cruel events in the New England town of Darkness Falls in 1941. A spinster recluse gives village children a gold coin if they bring their lost teeth to her, but then two kids disappear, and the enraged citizens lynch and burn the old bat, who suffers horribly. Shortly thereafter, the missing kids turn up, and the guilty town falls under a horrible curse.

Though never fully explained, that punishment apparently involves the mysterious murder of every child when he loses his last baby tooth. Since everyone faces this milestone at one point or another, one might suspect that this pattern would seriously suppress the town's population – or at least encourage some radical dental experiments. Nevertheless, the movie's second prologue involves a pair of 12-year-olds exchanging a first kiss right after the boy loses his last baby tooth. They promise to go to a school dance together, but before they can realize this romantic adventure the Spooky Spinster turns up to terrify the lad and to murder his mother. Despite the boy's testimony about the spectral presence that invaded his home, the cops assume he committed the crime himself and haul him off for a long vacation in the booby hatch.

Both prologues come off without undue embarrassment but then, after some 10 minutes of running time, we enter the movie proper and things go horribly, ludicrously wrong. Chaney Kley, a blank, brooding leading man with a rugged jaw, makes his feature film debut as the adult version of the boyish victim of prologue number two. Released from the mental hospital and working as a dealer in Vegas, he returns to Darkness Falls at the behest of his former puppy-love girlfriend, who is far less spunky and interesting in her adult version (Emma Caulfield, Anya in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," performing here with deer-in-the-headlights confusion and earnestness). The lovely lady believes that only her bonkers buddy can help her baby brother – a frightened kid who has just (you guessed it) lost a tooth and begun seeing horrible visions of the ghostly geezer that wants to kill him.

The townspeople view both the poor boy and the returning prodigal as lavishly loony, suffering from sick hallucinations – and the movie might have worked better had director Jonathan Liebesman (an ambitious South African making his muddled debut) left some doubt that they might have been right. As it is, we've gotten glimpses from the beginning of the Terrible Tooth Taker so there's never much doubt about the direction of the comic-book plot. The only way to stop the Monster is to shine light in her direction – so there's lots of material about flashlights, headlights, lighthouses, broken bulbs and, inevitably, a climactic regional power outage. The final confrontation takes place on the spiral stairway of a local lighthouse, and it's surprisingly well staged, thanks largely to the capable creature effects created by the legendary Stan Winston ("The Terminator," "Aliens," "Jurassic Park").

To reach that point, however, you must first survive long stretches of dialogue more alarming than the feckless frights of things that go "boo" in the dark. A preview audience laughed uproariously when the sleek leading lady comforted our hunky hero after a fight by telling him: "Sit still why I pick some of the gravel out of your scalp." The movie also suffers from its distractingly dotty location shots: Though it's supposed to take place in coastal New England, they filmed the thing outside Melbourne, Australia, creating a unique sense of place – of no place and nowhere, to be exact. (TWO STARS, rated a ridiculous PG-13, despite some harsh language and frequently gruesome violence.)

This week's second unfurled feature, "The Hours," is opening for the first time in theatres everywhere, after playing at the end of 2002 in L.A. and New York for Oscar consideration. The movie undeniably deserves that consideration, especially for the unglamorous but career-transforming tour-de-force performance by Nicole Kidman, but few filmgoers will find the movie itself enjoyable or satisfying.

The film begins with a gorgeously shot recreation of the 1941 suicide-by-drowning of novelist Virginia Woolf (Ms. Kidman, unrecognizable in a prosthetic hook nose). The rest of the picture flits back and forth among deeply depressed characters in three different eras in three different cities. First, there's Woolf herself, struggling against mental illness and threatening to run away from her husband and their English country home in 1923. Then there's Julianne Moore as a desperate housewife living in 1950s suburban splendor in Southern California, but willing to do anything to escape her stultifying existence. Then there's Meryl Streep in 1990s Manhattan, trying to cheer up her former lover, a self-pitying poet and terminal AIDS patient (Ed Harris), by providing him with a literary soiree in his honor.

Director Stephen Daldry coaxes an otherworldly glow out of every one of his scenes; in terms of its delight in tiny details of prop, location and perfectly appointed sets, "The Hours" may count as one of most visually vibrant vehicles of recent years. All the performances qualify as superior, especially by Kidman, who conveys an unforgettable portrait of a brilliant woman fiercely determined to think her way out of her encroaching madness. Streep also shines (far more than in her inexplicably over-praised supporting role in "Adaptation") as a veteran of New York's publishing world who's happily settled into a stable lesbian love, but yearns to impose some elegant order on the shattered fragments of her own melancholy past.

Like the Michael Cunningham novel that inspired the film, "The Hours" connects its three interspersed stories by reference to Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway": Woolf herself has just begun writing the book, the Julianne Moore character is reading it, and the Meryl Streep character is named "Clarisa" like Mrs. Dalloway, and her friends regularly note her resemblance to the fictional socialite. There's also another connection among the characters, but that arrives as a mild surprise at the movie's conclusion.

Two persistent problems bedevil "The Hours" and work to undermine its otherwise excellent aspects: First, it's difficult to stay emotionally involved in a movie in which the only tension involves when and how the characters will kill themselves. (For the record, two of them do succeed in spectacular self-slaughter; another major figure in the film loses nerve in the midst of the attempt.) The movie makes an elegant case that it requires courage to soldier on in life, but never suggests why suicide should look so alluring. The characters make brief references to "happier days," but we only see them in their full-out misery so there's an oppressive, monochromatic mood of despair, despite all the colorful performances and painterly visions.

The other problem with the film involves the grinding, groaning omnipresent musical score by Philip Glass. It will probably win an utterly undeserved Academy Award for Best Score because Glass brings to his movie work all kinds of classical cachet as a master of "minimalism" – that aesthetic atrocity involving endlessly repeated, twitching and dizzying musical figures that operate in the style of psychedelic, sonic wallpaper. The overblown symphonic sighing in "The Hours" communicates seasickness rather than substance, as if we're supposed to be distracted by some whirring, cosmic sewing machine; it annoyingly intrudes to spoil even the movie's best scenes. In fact, listening to two hours of this relentless and pretentious musical torture might succeed in inducing suicidal impulses in even the hardiest moviegoer. (TWO AND A HALF STARS, Rated PG-13 despite intense, adult themes, a few disturbing moments of violent death and serious sex references. Not recommended for teen-agers – even literary teen-agers – or for the faint-of-heart of any age.)