Movie Review – Visions

We’ll cut this short – if you’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, you’ve seen better versions of Visions.
After a car accident leaves Evie (Ilsa Fisher, Arrested Development) traumatized and slightly unbalanced, her husband (Anson Mount, Hell On Wheels) thinks it would be a fantastic idea to uproot her entire life and movie her to a vineyard. Pregnant and hearing voices, she encounters farmers with strange pagan traditions and over-sensitive wine critics, as well as her emerging schizophrenic hallucinations. Her only friend is Sadie (Gillian Jacobs, Community), a fellow mom-to-be and fellow no! meds! activist, and that’s pretty much where this story breaks from being a semi-interesting ghost story to meander down a path of did she or didn’t she. There’s a slap-dash history lesson, and of course, magical migrant farmers. They leave fetishes and talismans and speak hushed Spanish while giving wary but meaningful stares, upping the ante of a property owner’s alienation on her own land.
I really despise the Magical Other in horror movies. I think it’s the idea of someone who doesn’t look “American” being poor and backwards and that’s why their magics work. Unsophisticated brains totally see the supernatural and thousands of years of magics keep them safe from evil, if they don‘t keep them from being migrant farmers in California.  It bugs me, especially when like all of the secondary characters in this movie they weren’t given anything to do but stand there and wave dolls at people.
You’ll see some familiar television faces in this, making it only slightly better than a Lifetime Halloween Special. John de Lancie (Star Trek: TNG, Hand the Rocks The Cradle)plays a fellow vineyard owner whose only role is to hand over information well after it’s useful, Jim Parsons (Big Bang Theory), as Evie’s doctor whose only role is to prescribe anti-psychotics to a pregnant woman, and Joanna Cassidy (Body of Proof), as an esteemed wine critic whose only role is to act creepy and exit abruptly.
The director Kevin Greutert gave us such gems as Saw 3D and Saw IV and Jessabelle (which I actually enjoyed) and the screenplay was written by a couple of promising writers, Lucas Sussman (Below) and L.D. Goffigan (Hunger) who will no doubt provide Blumhouse Pictures and other production companies with many forgettable low-budget mashups for years to come.
It’s rated R, maybe because there’s blood, I’m not really sure.
There are better ways to spend 82 minutes, like maybe an transorbital lobotomy.
Visions is currently streaming on Netflix.