3 out of 5

Director: Brad Anderson

Brad Anderson is a director of flexible talents, as witnessed by the various film genres he’s worked with in his career – Next Stop Wonderland, the Machinist, Transsiberian. He excels at creating characters from very little, but oddly has yet to make a film that – by my opinion – feels firmly stamped as his own. This is again the issue with “Vanishing on 7th Street,” a fascinating thriller done with an impressively modest budget (which is also an Anderson touch) that doesn’t unnerve one enough to carve out its own niche. We open with John Leguizamo, who changes film reels at the mall’s movie theater, browsing through some occult reading when suddenly all of the lights in the building go out. He wanders around to discover piles of clothes everywhere, as though people have disappeared from where they stood… We get several introductions of this nature until we’re at the last stand – a bar where Hayden Christensen, Leguizamo, Thandie Newton, and Jacob Latimore gather as the city seems to be overtaken by shadows. And lest you find yourself without a light, you disappear into the shadows as well. The bar atmosphere is excellent, and, as mentioned, the characters are all perfectly defined from little sketches – Anderson wrings great performances from moments that would’ve been throwaways in other films. The plot has elements of horror and mystery, as the characters try to piece together what’s happening and why, and satisfyingly, the story doesn’t dissolve into bickering, nor does it rely on music cues and cheap gimmicks to scare you – it mostly relies on the unknown for creeps. Alas, it’s never committed fully to screen. Session 9 has the same feeling as this film – a very creepy scenario haunted by interesting personality types that never fully hits the viewer due to a strange veneer between film and film-goer. “Vanishing on 7th Street” is not your typical horror or thriller, but neither can it turn it’s cool plot and characters into something new.