Blackwater Lane
Directed by Jeff Celentano
Written by Elizabeth Fowler
Starring Minka Kelly, Maggie Grace, and Dermot Mulroney
Rated PG-13
Runtime: 1 hour and 48 minutes
Available on Peacock in the U.S. now and for digital download in the UK January 27

by Samantha McLaren, Staff Writer

Some tropes exist for a reason. Crackly phone calls, shadows moving on walls, birds flying into windows—these are shorthand scares because they can be, well, scary, but they’re style, not substance. Director Jeff Celentano’s Blackwater Lane crams enough of these tricks in to try and fill the film’s runtime, but the end package still feels empty. 

Based on B.A. Paris’s 2017 novel of the same name, Blackwater Lane stars Minka Kelly as Cass, a schoolteacher who has just moved into an enormous English manor house complete with sprawling gardens. One dark and dreary British night, as she heads home to hubby Matthew (Dermot Mulroney) down a secluded lane, Cass encounters a car by the side of the road occupied by a woman (Sally Blouet) staring dead ahead, unmoving. Rather than doing a quick wellness check, Cass opts to drive on, only learning the next day that the woman was someone she knows—and that she was murdered.

This revelation feels like it should trigger a guilt spiral, but Elizabeth Fowler’s script doesn’t linger too long on this element beyond hinting at it as a possible explanation for Cass’s soon-to-be ordeal. As the investigation into the murder gets underway, Cass begins to experience strange phenomena in the house, from an unseen hand holding her below the surface of the bathwater to visions of a bloody knife on the kitchen counter. Many of these frights follow a familiar format: Cass looks, gasps, and turns away to seek confirmation from Matthew, only for the creepy person or thing to have mysteriously vanished. Rinse and repeat. 

With such a gorgeously Gothic setting–at least on the outside; the manor offers disappointingly clean and modern interiors–a haunting is the easy conclusion. But Blackwater Lane quickly peppers in another possibility with a heavy hand: Cass may be suffering early onset dementia like her mother. This is the explanation her husband pushes, but does he have another motive? And who exactly killed the woman in the lane, and why? 

The intrigue generated by these lingering questions keeps Blackwater Lane just about engaging enough to stick with as Cass rattles wide-eyed around the big house, waiting for the next scare scene to happen. Kelly doesn’t have enough to do to carry the bloated runtime, her character’s guilt and tragic backstory with her mother underexplored and her descent into possible madwoman and could-it-be murderess half-baked at best. It doesn’t help that everyone around her is acting suspicious, from her oddly flat husband to the oddly creepy student (Judah Cousin) who keeps showing up on her doorstep uninvited. Red herrings abound, but it doesn’t take a murder mystery aficionado to figure out what’s happening here. Still, when the big twist arrives, it’s handled clumsily enough to require extensive exposition and flashbacks to explain.

Blackwater Lane has all the right ingredients for a supernaturally tinged psychological thriller, but the chef appears to be inadvertently reading from the Lifetime drama recipe book instead. Overlong, overly reliant on clichés, and with so many fades to black that they loop back around from stylish to absurd, the film might kill an evening, but it won’t leave you itching to know who the killer is. 

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