Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

Vanishing on 7th Street Blu-ray Movie Review

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater May 13, 2011

I have a confession to make. One of my favorite guilty-pleasure sources of so-bad-it’s-good cinema is the rapture-sploitation sub-genre, where Christ’s followers are zapped from the face of the planet in one split-second disappearance, leaving regretful non-believers behind to wallow in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where the Antichrist’s roving death squads deliver a grim ultimatum: accept the Mark of the Beast or get your head lopped off. What’s not to love? Low-budget “outreach” films like A Thief in the Night and A Distant Thunder were created by evangelicals in the 1970s to scare audiences straight, and the genre was revived in the late 1990’s to capitalize on Y2K fears. Yes, these movies are inevitable cheesy, with a didactic, mildly condescending message, but you’ve got to admit—the premise is pretty disturbing. I’ve been waiting for a rapture/mass disappearance movie done right for a long time, so my curiosity was peaked when I first heard about Vanishing on 7th Street, the new film by director Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Transsiberian). The trailer is filled with all the usual pre-tribulation imagery—Piles of recently vacated clothing! Pilot-less planes crashing! Darkness descending over the Earth!—but the film chooses to be much more vague about the nature of the unexpected exodus. This one is more The Twilight Zone and less The 700 Club.

The film opens in a Detroit movie theater, where a crowd of popcorn-munching patrons laughs at the latest comedy while Paul (John Leguizamo), the stereotypical loner projectionist, checks all the reels and then settles in to read a book about unexplained phenomena. Of course, he’ll have one of his own on his hands soon enough. The power cuts out suddenly, plunging the theater into darkness—luckily, Paul is wearing a headlamp—and when the lights kick back on, there’s an unnerving silence, punctuated only by a few distant screams. Down in the screening room, Paul is greeted by an unnerving sight: there are no moviegoers left, just piles of clothing in the seats, pairs of now-empty shoes, and spilled concessions. Later, he sees a mall security guard, walking into a shadow-filled store, disappear into thin air. The guard’s voice even cuts out mid-word, leaving an eerily truncated echo. Our other main characters find themselves in similar scenarios. Rosemary (Thandie Newton), a physical therapist, is alone in a blackened hospital, where she discovers a patient strapped to an operating table with his chest cavity opened. When the overhead light blinks off, and then back on, the man is gone, but Rosemary, holding one of those phosphorescent glowsticks, remains. Downtown, in a high-rise apartment, young TV journalist Luke Ryder (Hayden Christensen) wakes up in the morning—next to a burning candle—and notices that the weatherwoman he’s been sleeping with is gone, his iPhone won’t turn on, and the world outside his floor-to-ceiling window is a people-less hellscape of crashed, abandoned vehicles. When he ventures out into the street, he steps on a pair of glasses, a subtle nod to the classic, post-apocalyptic Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last.”

These three urban castaways eventually converge at the only place in town that still has power, a dingy blues bar, where shotgun-toting twelve- year-old James (newcomer Jacob Latimore) has been feeding gas into a generator in the basement to keep the jukebox playing and the neon lights humming. (It takes forever for the characters to realize that, hey, maybe they should turn off some of the lights to conserve energy.) Two facts about their increasingly dark new existence quickly emerge: 1.) The days are getting drastically shorter, and 2.) if you’re not in the light or carrying a light, you’ll be enveloped by shadows and disappear. Several ideas are bandied about as to the cause of this plague—biblical reckoning, dark matter, aliens, the Large Hadron Collider, etc.—but the characters have little time to ask “why” when they’re trying desperately to stay alive. Frustratingly, the film never clues us in as to what’s really going on, preferring to dole out dead-end clues about the lost colony of Roanoke and 101- level philosophizing on metaphysics and the nature of existence. Although screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski clearly wants to spur some post-viewing conversation by being intentionally vague, the end result isn’t nearly as captivatingly mysterious as he’d hoped. I kept waiting for some kind of Jacob’s Ladder-esque twist, a reveal that would recontextualize—or, say, shed light on—everything I’d just seen, but it never arrived. Vanishing on 7th Street is much less than it initially seems; it’s a simple survival thriller with a novel premise, and no more.

In that limited capacity, though, the film does deliver at least a few good bump-in-the-night thrills. Director Brad Anderson knows his way around eerie horror locales—he gave us a claustrophobic mental asylum in the underrated Session 9—and he turns Detroit into even more of a nightmare vision than it already is. Filmed on location in abandoned stretches of the Motor City, the relatively low-budget film has loads of added production value, and this is enhanced by some effective digital trickery. The shadows in Vanishing move with organic fluidness, creeping over walls, spreading like time-lapse mold, and morphing into finger-like tendrils, always reaching out to grab the terrified characters. Dark humanoid figures glide threateningly through the frame. Shapes move unexpectedly when lights flicker. It’s creepy. If only the film had a story to match. The thrown-together characters spend most of the film scrambling to stay in the light, and in between power outages and miscellaneous fetch quests, we learn a little bit about them. Luke is separated from his wife, but still loves her. Paul is a loser who’s never amounted to anything. Rosemary is desperate over the loss of her infant son and James still thinks his mom is coming back for him. Each confronts his or her fears and expectations, and to that extent the narrative does come together in the end, but as an audience we’re left with the nagging sensation that something is missing —a point. The actors are convincing, the atmosphere is intense, and the characters rage admirably against the dying of the light, but what dark force are they fighting? Is this epidemic scientific or spiritual? Barring some kind of sequel/prequel/spin-off—which seems unlikely—we may never know.

Vanishing on 7th Street Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Vanishing on 7th Street features a heavily post-processed image, so at times it's hard to judge the film's 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer. If you listen to the audio commentary with director Brad Anderson, he describes how he decided to shoot with the Red One camera—simply because it's the "it" camera of the moment—but how he ultimately had a hard time with the digital rig because it didn't perform very well in low light. And, obviously, this is a film that's all about low light. To compensate, the sets had to be lit quite brightly and the footage toned and tweaked in post until Anderson and his producers found an aesthetic they liked. The result is a picture that's very stylized, with dark, crushing blacks, highlights that have a strange glow to them, and colors that are selectively desaturated or pumped up. It works in the context of the film, but they probably could've gotten away with a more natural look. On the plus side, clarity is strong throughout—facial textures have real presence, props are cleanly defined, and outlines are sharp without seeming overly edgy. Noise levels aren't as bad as you'd think considering the low light levels, but I did notice four or five instances of obvious banding, most often in the color gradient of the night sky. Whether this was present in the original footage, introduced in post, or the effect of disc compression is hard to say. Overall, though, I imagine the film is fairly true to source, and for that it earns a solid score in the video department.

Vanishing on 7th Street Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

It's clear that a lot of thought went into Vanishing on 7th Street's sound design, as the film's DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround track is prodigiously active. Like most horror/thrillers, you can expect lots of creepy, atmospheric immersion from the rear channels. Skittering, disembodied voices whisper in the space behind your head. Muted screams eek out of the distance, now-ownerless dogs howl, and city sound is reduced to a hushed, unsettling ambience. The soundstage is often punctured by detailed effects—the roar of a lit flare, loud gunshots, the coughing thrum of a generator, the flicker of a movie theater projector—and the LFE channel is activated both for potent explosions and to underscore the sense of dread. When all else is quiet, Lucas Vidal's score bubbles up ominously, making sure we don't get too comfortable. Everything sounds wonderful, with clarity throughout a broad dynamic range. Dialogue can sometimes seem a hair low, but there was never a time when I couldn't understand what was being said. The disc includes optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles in easy-to-read white lettering.

Vanishing on 7th Street Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Director Brad Anderson: Anderson unfortunately doesn't have any more of a clue than you or I as to what caused the mass disappearance, but he's got plenty of other details about the making of the film to share. Most of his talk is concerned with pointing out key decisions that had to be made in the production—nothing revelatory, but worth listening to if you're a student of indie horror.
• Alternate Endings (1080i, 8:21): There's nothing alternate about these "alternate" endings, unfortunately. Just some slightly rearranged shots and the same basic conclusion.
• Revealing the Vanishing on 7th Street (1080i, 7:04): The kind of promo featurette where the cast and crew all gush lovingly about one another.
• Creating the Mood on 7th Street (1080i, 4:23): Basically an extension of the previous piece, here director Brad Anderson, the film's writer, and the actors discuss the eerie vibe the movie was going for, and how shooting in Detroit made the magic happen.
• Behind the Scenes Montage (1080i, 2:13): A quick clip of on-set footage, not narrated.
• Fangoria Interviews (1080i, 30:23): Here you'll find an extensive interview with director Brad Anderson—who looks tired and slightly uninterested—as well as a shorter conversation with young star Jacob Latimore.
• HDNet: A Look at Vanishing on 7th Street (1080i, 4:21): A typical HDNet promo, with clips from the film and a few quick interviews with the stars.
• Theatrical Trailer (1080p, 2:32)
• Also From Magnolia Home Entertainment Blu-ray (1080p, 4:14)

Vanishing on 7th Street Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Vanishing on 7th Street wasn't as good as I had hoped. Although I can understand the writer and director not wanting to explain away the mass disappearances, it feels like even they have no idea what's actually happening to their characters. If you crave answers, you'll be disappointed here. (Lost fans, you may have anger-inducing flashbacks to season six.) That said, if you're just looking for a spooky survival tale—and the film does have a few great moments of white-knuckle dread—Vanishing will do for a rainy evening rental.