Red Lights

Red Lights is Elizabeth Olsen's fourth film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012.

## Plot Summary

Psychologist Margaret Matheson and her assistant study paranormal activity, which leads them to investigate a world-renowned psychic who has resurfaced years after his toughest critic mysteriously passed away.

## Synopsis

The film opens with two primary characters: university professor and psychologist Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver), who investigates claims of paranormal phenomena, and her assistant Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy), a physicist. The audience is provided with an insight into the world of the opening section's primary characters while concurrently observing the public reemergence of a psychic, Simon Silver (Robert De Niro).

The ending of the film's first half is signified by the sudden death of Matheson from a chronic vascular condition at the same time as one of Silver's comeback performances takes place, an incident that is particularly significant because Matheson was a former nemesis of Silver, a skeptic who investigated the psychic's work, under similar circumstances. Matheson also had a previous encounter with Silver, when he had, for an instant, got the best of her by bringing up the subject of her son's spirit (her son was in a vegetative coma and on life support). Matheson agrees only to appear on a televised panel in anticipation of Silver's return. Prior to her death, Matheson refuses to cooperate with Buckley's insistent call to undertake another investigation of Silver, warning Buckley against such an undertaking due to her previous experience with the psychic.

However, following Matheson's death, the assistant becomes increasingly obsessed with investigating Silver for the purpose of exposing the popular psychic as a fraud. During Buckley's efforts to reveal Silver's large-scale trickery, a series of inexplicable events occurs — electronic devices explode, dead birds appear, and Buckley's laboratory is vandalized. Buckley's paranoia intensifies, as he believes Silver is behind these incidents. Buckley's calm and rational disposition eventually degenerates into an obsessiveness that resembles the late Matheson's intense antipathy to paranormal claims. As part of the introduction to the climactic section of the film, Silver agrees to participate in an investigation proposed by an academic from the same university that Matheson was employed by, and Buckley joins the observation team for the tests.

In the final moments of the film, Buckley's assistants manage to reveal the manner in which Silver defrauds the public through a close analysis of the test footage accumulated by Buckley from the university's investigation. At the same time, Buckley exposes Silver at one of the psychic's public performances, and Silver is left dumbfounded. Buckley then reveals to the viewer that he actually possesses paranormal abilities and has been responsible for the inexplicable incidents that have occurred during his investigation of Silver. In a letter to his late mentor, Buckley explains a realization in which he arrives at an understanding that his decision to work with Matheson, despite the possibility of loftier career opportunities as a physicist, was the result of an unconscious attempt to seek others like himself; the revelation clarifies that Buckley's choices were made in spite of his conscious denial of the existence of paranormal activity (such denial is touched on earlier in the film, whereby the character implies that he chose this career because his mother was delayed from seeking critical medical treatment due to advice from a fraud psychic). The letter to Matheson ends with regret that Buckley denied her the consolation of knowing that there is something more, and that now she deserved even more, "everything". Buckley then turns off the life-support machine that is keeping Matheson's son alive. He then walks out of the hospital and concludes his letter to the deceased Matheson: "You can't deny yourself forever."

## Cast

* Cillian Murphy as Tom Buckley
* Sigourney Weaver as Margaret Matheson
* Robert De Niro as Simon Silver
* Toby Jones as Paul Shackleton
* Joely Richardson as Monica Hansen
* Elizabeth Olsen as Sally Owen
* Craig Roberts as Ben
* Leonardo Sbaraglia as Leonard Palladino
* Adriane Lenox as Rina
* Garrick Hagon as Howard McColm
* Burn Gorman as Benedict Cohen
* Mitchell Mullen as Jim Carroll
* Nathan Osgood as Michael Sidgwick
* Madeleine Potter as Sarah Sidgwick
* Eloise Webb as Susan Sidgwick
* Jeany Spark as Traci Northrop
* Jan Cornet as David Matheson
* Robert G. Slade as Interviewer - 70's
* Eugenio Mira as Young Simon Silver
* Lynn Blades as Dana
* Eben Young as Dick
* Becci Gemmell as Lucy Marconi

## Trivia

* The scene in which Margaret Matheson exposes a psychic healer by listening in on a partner feeding him instructions wirelessly was based on the case in which skeptics James Randi and Steve Shaw (better known under his stage name Banachek), with technical assistance from crime scene analyst and electronics expert Alexander Jason, exposed Peter Popoff in 1986. In that case, as in the scene, Popoff's wife Elizabeth was feeding him information that she and her aides had taken from prayer request cards filled out by audience members over wireless radio. Some of the dialogue is taken almost verbatim from the actual case. In May 1986, Randi presented the evidence on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962), exposing Popoff's fraudulent practices. In 1987, Popoff declared bankruptcy, only to make a comeback in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
* The interception of the wireless transmission and the fake horoscopes handed out in class are taken from James Randi's actual work of exposing frauds.
* In the video lab where Buckley works, there is a copy of the famous poster "I Want To Believe" from The X-Files (1993), but the quote is changed to "I Want To Understand".
* The videos of the parapsychological experiments done with Silver at the university mimic those done in real life with Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s. These experiments are discussed at length and clips of the actual video are shown in the James Randi documentary, An Honest Liar (2014).
* The cards used by Sigourney Weaver to test psychic ability are the same cards Bill Murray uses in the opening scene of Ghostbusters (1984), which Weaver was also in.
* The song the guy on the toilet is whistling is from the bird-catcher in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "The Magic Flute".
* The character played by the Argentinean actor Leonardo Sbaraglia, carries by last name PALLADINO. It is a nod to one of the great mediums of the early twentieth century, the Italian EUSAPIA PALLADINO who was investigated by Dr. Eugene Osty and discovered in fraud on several occasions. Evidently, the scriptwriter-director has researched a lot ...
* The black and white clip of the Russian woman moving metal objects and matchsticks around on a table shown by Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) in class, is the same clip used in The Atticus Institute (2015), another film about clairvoyants.
* Dr. Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) makes a comment in the movie about Leonard Pallodino being from Argentina. He is played by Argentinian Leonardo Sbaraglia.
* Toby Jones, Elizabeth Olsen, and Sigourney Weaver appeared in several movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Cillian Murphy and Burn Gorman appeared in movies in the DC Universe.
* A post-credit scene shows an open window with billowing yellow curtains, a scene seen earlier after the ransacked warehouse.