The Night Listener
Unravels its layers with a cleverly guarded level of intensity.
Hoping to find the audience that enjoyed 'The Sixth Sense', director Patrick Stettner has come up with a psychological suspense thriller based on the novel by Armistead Maupin about a late night radio host (Williams) who strikes up a relationship on the phone with a young boy (Culkin). But when he gets to know the boy's mother (Collette) it takes him on a harrowing path of discovery. 'The Night Listener' is one of those slow burning thrillers that unravels its layers with a cleverly guarded level of intensity. It contains some reasonable performances and offers you several alternatives as to what the ending might be – it's not overtly scary, more an unsettling puzzle. Some are likely to go with it, others may just be impatient to get to the end. No clues, but it is supposedly based on true events. [Matt Arnoldi]