Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Blackwater Lane’ on Peacock, a Clunker of a Supernatural Mystery Starring Minka Kelly

Minka Kelly gets gaslit something fierce in Blackwater Lane ( now streaming on Peacock ), a deadly dull movie that is not at all a gas. She plays a drama teacher who finds herself smack in the middle of some real drama when a woman she knows turns up dead. The film is based on B.A. Paris’ novel The Breakdown , and plays like a mystery that’s also a thriller that’s also a ghost story – and it’s not very good.

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The Gist: IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT. As so many of them are! Cass (Kelly) takes the bumpy dirt road home. Is this BLACKWATER LANE? Hell yeah it is. It’s raining and misty and foggy and her phone says NO SIGNAL and then she sees a car in the ditch. She stops, and the woman behind the wheel doesn’t seem to be moving, but Cass kinda shrugs it off. It’s late and she just had a drink with a co-worker, John (Alan Calton), who’s all but guaranteed to make her husband Matthew (Dermot Mulroney) jealous. Wait – let me back up a bit here. The movie opens with a sequence where the camera glides into and up and through the halls and rooms of an old mansion, past sleeping Dermot and to a room where Minka looks at tarot cards and a bird slams into the window and startles everyone – a sequence that has absolutely no bearing on anything that happens in the rest of the movie, besides being a Bad Omen scene that foreshadows all the terrible crap to come. For the characters, and for us, the people gutting out this movie.

Before we go any further, I want to talk about this house. It’s in the middle of absolute nowhere, it’s gigantic and it’s at least 100 years old. It’s encircled by a canal that opens up into a beautiful lake out past the backyard. Wait, is this a moat ? I’ll be damned. I think it is! It unfortunately does not seem to be populated by gators, hungry to snack on anyone who might dare attempt a siege and invasion. The house seems pretty big for two people, but whatever. When you gotta sprawl, you gotta sprawl. Some renovations are happening, so there’s plastic sheeting hanging in one of the wings. Cass gripes to Matthew about the mess, possibly because there’s only like 9,000 other square feet in which to exist in this dump. Now, is it old enough to be haunted? Well gollee, I dunno! And will whatever apparition-like whatnot Cass sees inevitably manifest behind the plastic sheeting? Almost certainly!

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Now, about the lady in the car. She’s dead. Cass knew her, and the plot that envelops them consists of so many red herrings, I lost count. The Only Cop In Town (Natalie Simpson) knocks on the door to investigate and Cass worries that she’s somehow implicated. Matthew is acting a bit cold and assholish. Cass confides in her bestie Rachel (Maggie Grace). The alarm system at the house doesn’t work and needs to be repaired by a guy who seems nice but also seems creepy and shows up unannounced. Cass keeps getting staticky unknown phone calls that she doesn’t just ignore like a normal person would. She finds an earring at the memorial site by the road. One of her students keeps dropping by and is he being creepy or just nursing a milfy crush? When she’s home alone at night she hears whispery voices and creaky floors and doors open by themselves and she wonders if it’s her late mother. A fox (another omen?) keeps appearing in the yard, and sometimes a man who’s there and then suddenly isn’t there. She keeps being the victim of aggressive tailgaters, too. And then there’s the coworker guy, don’t forget him. Did I mention that Cass was once hospitalized for mental illness? Well, she was, and you can’t help but feel bad for her since it’s just a plot device deployed to make us wonder if what she’s experiencing is real or just hallucinations. Guess we’ll just have to see if she gets anywhere by Googling “hallucinations.” Spoiler alert: She doesn’t.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I can’t pinpoint which movie-of-the-week my mom would’ve half-watched on network TV on a Tuesday night in 1985, so I’ll just say Blackwater Lane is like an episode of Murder, She Wrote without the charm of an amateur detective as the lead.

Performance Worth Watching: Kelly is an endearing presence in most things, even if they make her look silly, like this movie does.

Memorable Dialogue: Cass reads our minds: “None of it makes any sense!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Blackwater Lane is one of those movies where a bunch of prescription bottles sit in the foreground of a shot and the protagonist nervously opens one and swallows a pill without taking a drink of water . Who DOES that? Only people in movies, that’s who. And this is less of a movie than a collection of red herrings that yank us in one direction, then the other, then the other, and then another, until you just want to find the screenwriter and fill their gas tank with cement. Minka Kelly is just trapped in this thing, asked to play a character who’s more of a thing to be manipulated than an actual protagonist; to be fair, we can’t help but empathize with her, and hope that she’ll fall asleep and wake up in another movie.

But alas, Kelly’s character just routinely falls asleep and wakes up at the hospital or in her room or on the floor, after all the times she’s clobbered with a phony plot device designed to distract and/or deceive us. Need she suffer so for our entertainment? The film plods along, sluggish and dull, as Cass is gaslit and gaslit and gaslit, psychologically tortured in one nonsense scene after another. Eventually, all is revealed, in a climax that’s so absurd and convoluted, it’s not just laughable, but anger-inducing. Someone please drown this movie in the moat.

Our Call: Road’s out. Rerouting… to a different movie. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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