OxfordPress.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: Messages from the afterlife unnerve Costner, but the spooky first half is far better than the payoff.

Details: Starring Kevin Costner, Kathy Bates, Susanna Thompson, Mischa Barton, Kathryn Erbe and Ron Rifkin. Rated PG-13 for thematic intensity and mild sensuality. 1 hour, 30 minutes.

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Review: The movies have long peddled the reassuring notion of an afterlife as a communication station, through which our departed loved ones can contact us.

But rational men, like head of emergency services at Chicago Memorial Hospital, Dr. Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner), are supposed to resist such ideas until confronted with irrefutably spooky evidence.

So cue the flickering light bulbs, the frequent stormy nights, the skittish trained parrot, the mysterious drawings that appear in conveniently foggy windows and the near-death patients reporting glimpses of the beyond. Here comes Dragonfly, one more yarn about ghostly messages from the grave, effective in its suspenseful build-up but less so in its punch-line payoff.

Darrow's wife, Emily, is the one who seems to be trying to tell him something important from the next world. A socially committed doctor in her own right, she went off to Venezuela on a medical mercy mission and died when a bus she was riding plummeted off a remote mountain road, killing all the passengers.

Ever since, her emotionally volatile husband has been seeing and hearing signs of her attempts to contact him. Her pediatric cancer patients with near-death experiences tell Joe of encountering Emily. They draw images of squiggly crosses and tell Joe that his wife "wants you to go there." A brain-dead man on a respirator starts channeling Emily's voice, before grabbing onto Joe's arm. Then things get really spooky.

Dragonfly, which gets its name from a birthmark of Emily's and perhaps from one form her spirit takes after her death, is far better while being just creepy than in its loose-end-tying resolution. Eventually, of course, Joe must head to Venezuela -- played by Kauai, Hawaii -- to trace Emily's steps and learn the meaning of those squiggly crosses. But before he finds what she was leading him to discover, Joe takes some credibility-stretching actions.

Still, this is one of Costner's better film efforts in quite a while, which isn't saying much. (It is not good enough to get him out of the hole he dug with 3,000 Miles to Graceland.) He is only required to grieve listlessly, appear mystified by these seemingly otherworldly messages and go crazy when the hospital hierarchy tries to stop him from causing a disruptive ruckus, but he manages.

Director Tom Shadyac, who helmed such broad comedies as Jim Carrey's Liar Liar and Eddie Murphy's Nutty Professor, shows he can handle drama, even if it eventually gets away from him. If the eerie tone and eventual unexpected payoff remind you of the films of M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable), that probably is not unintended.

Shadyac certainly gathered a fine supporting cast for Costner, even if Kathy Bates as a kindly neighbor, Linda Hunt as an enigmatic nun and Ron Rifkin as Tom's medical colleague have surprisingly little to do.

Dragonfly is ultimately a movie about faith, and Shadyac clearly has faith that audiences are ready to embrace a fundamentally hokey tale. Chances are that he is right.

— Hap Erstein, Cox News Service