Lost Souls

A best-selling author (Ben Chaplin) has been unwittingly chosen to become the Antichrist on his 33rd birthday. Unfortunately, he’s an atheist who pooh-poohs the whole thing, giving Winona Ryder, as the agent of the True God, only one day to convince the doubting victim and forestall the reign of Satan on Earth. There are moments when Pierce Gardner’s script actually achieves the delirious, unintentional hilarity of The Exorcist, making this—on one level, at least—more entertaining than the usual repent-the-end-is-nigh doomsday fantasy. But such moments are few: Mainly, it’s just the same old pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo, dim lighting, gruesome imagery and shattering musical spikes to make us jump. The anticlimactic, is-that-all-there-is ending winds everything up not with a bang, but a whimper.