When Dr. Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) hears that his pregnant wife Emily (Susanna Thompson), an oncologist volunteering for the Red Cross in a remote mountain village in Venezuela, was in an accident, he frantically travels there hoping to find her. He learns the bus she was riding in slid into a raging river, and her body was swept away. The locals assure him there’s no chance she survived.
Back home in Chicago, Darrow tries to escape the pain by immediately returning to his routine as an emergency room doctor. Harsh comments and rash decisions prompt his boss to order him to take time off. But he insists on going back, saying he’d promised Emily he would look in on her patients while she was away.
And that’s when the creepy stuff starts to happen. In the children’s cancer ward, kids tell him they saw Emily during their near-death experiences. They compulsively draw a squiggly cross shape. Darrow presses for more. Parents and staff tell him to back off.
The supernatural spookiness follows him home. Emily loved dragonflies, and even had a birthmark resembling one. In the darkened bedroom, her dragonfly paperweight rolls across the floor unbidden. Dragonflies flit near the window. The family parrot goes berserk and draws the same squiggly cross in the dirt of an overturned flowerpot. Classic jumpscare: Darrow see a flash of Emily outside their window.
Darrow tracks down Sister Madeline (Linda Hunt), a nun who was also banned from the hospital for asking too many questions of the kids about dreams in their near-death experiences. Is it really possible his wife, dead or even perhaps in a coma, could be sending him messages through these children? Sister Madeline’s answer: yes. She makes an intriguing observation: “There are 100 steps on the ladder of consciousness between being fully alert and being dead. To put a patient under, they bring them down only to the 10th rung. Beneath that is a descending gray-scale like the depths of an ocean no one has explored.”
After a meltdown at the hospital, Darrow decides he needs closure.
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Kevin Costner is particularly good at these “good guy who acts like a jerk” roles, a man so consumed with his own personal grief he can’t be even passingly nice, staring into the half-distance while friends are trying to console him or snapping at emergency room staff who need his help with a vulnerable patient. But you get why he’s acting out; you want him to find solace.
There are a good dozen supporting characters, many of whom don’t seem necessary to the plot – old college chums, other family members. And therein lies a chief failing: a plot that is not so much a linear progression toward catharsis, but a grab bag of creepy revelations from dying kids, jump scares, and various other supernatural bumps in the night.
I found myself wishing there was more for Kathy Bates to do. She’s so natural as the plain-talking next-door neighbor, a lawyer who forces Joe to confront whether he’s got real evidence that Emily is trying to reach him from The Beyond, or it’s all in his grief-stricken head? It’s a plot point that should have been given more weight if Dragonfly was to aspire to be more than just a passable supernatural thriller.
So too, Linda Hunt could have contributed so much more as the afterlife-obsessed nun whose perspectives on near-death experiences convinces Darrow he may be on to something. Again, it was a missed opportunity to add some thematic depth around faith and the afterlife.
Halfway through, my wife asked me, how did we not see this wonderful movie. Up to that point, it’s creepy enough to be a fine evening’s entertainment, and we’re really invested in learning just what did happen to Emily Darrow.
Alas, the slowly built tension and doubt turns into a headlong dash toward revelation at the end. The final frames do reward those who long for some sort of positive closure. Why not recommend it? Let’s compare it to a superior supernatural twister, The Sixth Sense. You can rewatch that 1999 film carefully and appreciate the clues that led to The Reveal. With 2002 Dragonfly, once it’s done, there’s nothing to ponder. They squandered the opportunity to explore deeper emotional or religious themes, and there are no mechanics in the spooky stuff that benefit from a second viewing.
Too bad. Costner, Bates, Hunt. They could have been used better.