When Good Parents are Away
CLASSIFICATION MC Mature Catholics
RATING Three of 5 Stars
Distributed by Lionsgate (released in the US on 6 March 2009)
70 minutes
The Film
Horsemen is a thriller film that David Callahan wrote and Jonas Akerlund directed.
The Preview
The Story
The film opens with an old man and his dog, one winter morning, walking towards the frozen lake and looking for a tree to cut down. His dog’s barks pointed to a covered dish container placed on a stand at the middle of the iced lake. Looking around, he finds the phrase “Come and See” in bold red letters marked at the trunk of four trees. As he lifts the lid, his eyes widen.
Meanwhile, Aidan Breslin (Dennis Quaid), a recently-widowed detective at 246th Precinct, wakes up to that same morning to find himself emotionally detached from his firstborn son Alex (Lou Taylor) who is reading today’s paper in the dining room.
Along the way to the police station, Breslin received a call for assistance in Wisconsin. He drove to the frosty place to learn that no body has been found by the responding police. When he opens the tray, he finds bloody teeth, all sets of it, inside. The local police told him that they sought his help because of his experience in dental forensics. At the police station, he told Chief Krupa (Chelchie Ross) what he learned from the teeth. The puzzle took all his time that day. When he returns home, he finds Alex past asleep.
While attending holy mass with his two kids–Alex and younger Sean (Liam James)–Breslin receives a call from his precinct. He hurriedly leaves his kids at the middle of the sermon, leaving Alex a 20-dollar bill.
A bizarre murder happend. A wife and mother of three (including an adopted Asian daughter) is killed at home. She had been strung up on a suspension rig with hooks, the bedroom walls and windows painted red, and the fetus removed from the pregnant victim. Breslin is interviewing the eldest daughter Kristin (Zhang Ziyi) when the father, David Spitz (Peter Stormare) comes in to embrace the daughters. Breslin left Kristin his work number before leaving.
During the autopsy, Breslin learns that the victim drowned in her own blood that entered her lungs from the circular stab wound piercing the lungs and the heart. She was drugged before she was killed.
Breslin arrives in the school late to pick up Alex. In the car on their way home, Alex tells his father of tickets for a Detroit Red Wings game that night, and asks Breslin if he will be with them. Breslin agrees to go. When they arrive home, Alex tells Sean about the game that night against visiting Reds. Sean bursts with excitement. When the night comes, the kids, faces half-painted in red and white, excitedly prepares to leave for the game as they check on Breslin who just finished dressing down for the game.
But another work call came in reporting of another body found in Broadway. The boys walk away with great disappointment in their face. Breslin removes his Red Wings shirt and angrily throws it back to the wardrobe.
The victim is also hanged, and they find the shocked wife inside the wardrobe. The same modus operandi, and the living room where it happened is painted around with black.
At the police headquarter, Breslin learns of the tattoo parlor whose owner built the suspension rigs by order basis. Its owner confirms that he made four rights for that job.
Later at home, Breslin works on the case photos and evidences. Sean joins him and checks on the blood photos despite Breslin’s warnings not to. Sean asks him: “Come and see, what?” The question leads Breslin to check the phrase in his wife’s Bible, the Book of Revelation chapter 6. He now understands that the killing was ceremonial. But the evidence they had still cannot pinpoint the suspects. Gathering all the information available on the case, Breslin presents to his team the suspects’ profile. So the hunt begins.
With his mind consumed in the case, Breslin almost missed an appointment with the guidance counselor in Alex’s school. He finds out that Alex has not been attending school, and despite his intelligence, Alex is heading for trouble.
The following day Kristin meets Breslin outside the police station. She shocks him when she shows him the bloody fetus that was removed from the body of her pregnant adoptive mother. In the interrogation room, Breslin learns that she killed her mother to punish Spitz. She also hints that the police missed more important evidences at home.
So Bresdin and his assistant Stingray (Clifton Collins Jr.) went back to the Spitz residence, and found her old diary with disturbed drawings on it. Photos drop from the diary, and these shows Spitz having sex with the young Kristin. Back in the interrogation room, Kristen tells Breslin that the 12 hours of torture pays enough for the 10 years Kristin suffered in the hands of Spitz.
While pouring again on the case at home, Alex brought out a birthday cake to remember his dead mother. Father and son get into an argument as Alex, before walking out, accuses Breslin of not being with his mother when she needed him most in her deathbed.
At the police department, the following day, the medical examiner shows Breslin a chip obtained from one of the victims that contains a written biblical verse–Exodus 9:15–on it. The chip leads them to the bomb-rigged base of teh Four Horsement, as the serial killers came to be known. But they suspects got away, and the police came out empty except for the computer hard drive that Breslin salvaged from the destroyed building. Information in the drive leads them into a website.
Meanwhile, in a restaurant somewhere, a young man named Cory Kurth (Patrick Fugit) places white powder from a vial into a coffee and mixes it. When his elder brother Taylor (Eric Balfour) came in, Cory listens as his drunken brother confronts him for being gay and takes the coffee that Cory prepared and drinks it. A bald man watches them from the counter chair. As teh brothers walk out towards their apartment, the man followed him and pulled a knife at Cory demanding for anything in his pockets. Cory quickly stabs the thug in the stomach with an icepick and leaves him to die. But the police arrives on time. The thugh tells Breslin what Cory told him before he fell. Breslin has Cory’s name checked and gets his full name and address.
Somewhere, Taylor wakes up hanging from a rig, the same rig used in the murders. Cory approaches with surgical equipments and confronts Taylor. With his eyelids fixed open, Taylor watches his brother kills himself. When Breslin finds him later, Taylor was mentally deranged.
In the interrogation room, Breslin gets nothing more from Kristin about the other the remaining two Horsemen.
When Breslin arrives home with case folders, he found Alex alone as Sean stayed in a friend’s house to dine. So Breslin invites Alex to eat with him in a nearby restaurant, giving them time to talk. Alex tells Breslin that when their mother died Breslin never came back to them the way Breslin used to be. And again Breslin promises to Alex that after the case, everything will be different.
The following day, Chief Krupa assigns Breslin to another case as teh case of the Four Horseman has been closed with the fourth death (Cory’s). Breslin insists to stay with the case because the Horsemen will be doing something more sinister the following day. He discovered that one more victim has to die before the “veil is lifted.” The victims he notices have once common thing between them. They have the same psychotherapist. Then he realized that Alex too went to the same therapist as the victims, and that the teeth found in the platter was intended to guarantee that Breslin gets the case. His family, Breslin believes, is the target.
Breslin assigns Stingray to secure Alex at home, but hears him hit while they are talking on the phone. When he reaches home, Breslin finds Stingray unconscious on the floor. When he checks the room of Alex, he is not there; he instead finds the room fully painted with white, from walls to the lap to and a pocket Bible. In one wall, he sees the photo of the Metropolitan Theatre with a phrase written on it with blood: “Come and See.”
Breslin drives to the Met, and when he gets inside someone attacks him from behind. Whe he wakes up, he finds himself secured in a seat and sees Alex suspended in the air with the familiar rig, raised over the stage with blood dripping to the floor beneath. Alex tells him that he is the last horseman and his death will be the last sign for others to follow. Alex collapses on the rig as Breslin tries futilely to free himself from the he got handcuffed into. When he got out, he fired shots at the rig to bring Alex down.
The film closes with Breslin kissing Sean as the boy wakes up looking for Alex. Breslin tells him that Alex is doing okay. It remained unclear though if Alex survived.
The Review
Horsemen is a graphically violent film that explores the extreme consequences to children when parents have no time to spend with them due to the demands of work. The story is riddled with so much pain, visual horror, and despair. It appears to comment more on absentee parenting than a story about law enforcement.
Absentee parenting. The film proposes that children of very busy parents, even those parents in the law enforcement, could turn into criminals under their nose. Alex had to take over his father’s role towards his young brother Sean, and silenty endure being abandoned too, because of Breslin’s frequent absence and emotional disconnect from them. The very frustrating thing about Breslin’s job was the unscheduled and urgent callsof duty that broke through family time as the job required so. These calls came in the middle of something beautiful and binding for the family–while on their way to a game, at the middle of a sermon, and practically when one or both of his children needed him. He made many promises to be with them that he never kept because of the pull of work. And he always left Alex money each time he leaves them, as if buying his absence. These incidents gave Alex the impression that Breslin ditched them.
The issue brought up in the film is timely and represents a call to working parents to make painful choices between two important things in their lives–job (a financial resource to support self and the family) and the family (the very people parents worked in the first place to support). It also brings up the reality that many times, the family can come much later to the life of a parent already having his work when marriage happened; and thus the family’s importance can at times be placed at the backseat.
The film also invites viewers to look into their own lives, to look hard enough and see to it that their values have been in proper order as Christians must continue to do. In Roman Catholic teachings, the first order of priority must be God (the person’s close relationship to his Creator). The second order of priority is other people. And for married individuals, other people refer to one’s family–spouse, children and parents–first; then the community. For the unmarried, other people mean their parents and siblings, and then their community. Work, although important and valued in Christian teachings, is not even mentioned near these priorities.
When these priorities got reversed, the movie tells what could happen to the children.
Child abuse. Another important proposition from the film, although a common one among films dealing with sex crimes, is that abuse can transform a child towards evil. In the case of Kristin, her rape in the hands of her adoptive father became the deciding point of her final move to the darkness and crime. The film illustrates what evil parents can create in their children, and hopes that its repulsive depiction of this particular evil can wake up parents from the dangers their actions can bring to their family.
Adoption. The issue on adoption came up, although with lesser emphasis in the movie, in teh case of Kristin. The film proposed this point for reflection: Can children adopted bring to their adoptive parents the dark streaks of their biological parents? Will adoption be really a wise thing to do, even to those who have their own biological children? How can society ensure that adopted children be protected from evil adoptive parents?
The Verdict
Horsemen is too graphically violent for young people to watch. The horror and the sights of blood and death can be unnecessarily distressing to these viewers to justify viewing for the sake of entertainment. And parents must advise their kids to avoid watching this film. At the same time, immature minds can pick up wrong ideas from the movie, albeit unintentionally, such as dynamics of incest or modeling behavior of disturbed youths in the film. Although getting teh movie message with the right mental disposition can forewarn youngsters on things they need to avoid should they too become parents, the risks of wrong messages taken is so high to be worth it.
But matured Catholics and other Christians who can take on a sight of violence with clear mind, the film provides a fitting reminder on what it means to be parents today, with all the increasing demands at work, on what really are the higher priorities of being fathers and mothers of a family while meeting the need to make money to support it. They may hear this question silently asked to them: When situations demand it, which will I choose–my family or my work?
Reviewed by Zosimo Literatus
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