All portent and no meaningful delivery

Rating: 4/10 (11 April 2010)

One commentator has noted that this movie is a direct remake of The cabinet of Dr Caligari from the 1920's, but more recently the even more abysmal "For Sale by Owner" took the identical premise - investigator turns out to be the mental one, and butchered it. With such recent failure, one would hope that the script-writers could do something more imaginative.
Setting this movie in a mental home is such a cop-out because it means that nothing you see has to be real, or make sense.
The excessively overbearing soundtrack is as unsubtle as the rest of the movie, which is to say that even to numb-skull like me, the ending glared out from 15 minutes into the movie, and it was only the precise details that remained to be filled in.
Everyone's acting is first rate, but that does nothing to make up for the lack of satisfaction that this weak movie provides.
Surrealism doesn't automatically make a good movie, any more than a "twist" ending. It would have been a far greater twist if DiCaprio's character had gotten away and proved that there WAS a conspiracy...
I had such high hopes for this looking at the people involved with it, but now another great director is struck off my "always trust" list.
Has Hollywood's desire for safety tainted even this great director?