The Dead Will Tell (2004)

I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

Brilliant and touching

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Emily Parker (Anne Heche) is a lawyer in New Orleans. She accepts a marriage proposal and an antique ring from Billy Hytner. Her assistant Jeanie (Eva Longoria) senses something weird about the ring. She starts to be haunted by a ghostly woman and encountering past transmissions of the moon landing. She meets Billy's parents (Kathleen Quinlan, David Andrews) and his mother is not supportive. Emily starts researching the origins of the ring.There is nothing scary. It tries to be a spooky little ghost story. It's functionally made. There are fine actors. They actually shoot in New Orleans which is nice. It's a flat little TV movie and nothing more.

In New Orleans, the lawyer Emily Parker (Anne Heche) meets the handsome Billy Hytner (Jonathan LaPaglia) by chance; they date and fall immediately in love for each other. One month later, Billy proposes her and gives an engagement ring he bought in an antiquary shop. From this moment on, Emily has visions of a weird woman and she decides to investigate about the previous owner of the antique ring. She discovers that the woman that is haunting her is Marie Salinger (Leigh Jones), who disappeared in 1969, and the police had found only her severed finger with the ring. Her fiancé Paul Hamlin (Chris Sarandon) was accused of the murder but considered not-guilty by the jury. Meanwhile, Emily meets Billy's parents and is not accepted by her future mother-in-law Beth Hytner (Kathleen Quinlan). Emily continues to investigate the murder, disclosing the truth about Marie's death."The Dead Will Tell" is a simple, but attractive ghost story. The cast is excellent, and Anne Heche is very beautiful in the role of a woman obsessed for the truth. This low-budget television movie has a good screenplay, nice locations, very few special effects and I liked this romantic supernatural story. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Quando os Mortos Falam" ("When the Dead Speak")

Like a previous reviewer, I really wanted to like this movie. I tuned in because the promos mentioned James Van Praagh as the source for the storyline, and I was hoping to get some good and intelligent treatment of spirit communication.What a letdown.This was the same IL' thriller that almost totally ignores the real story, the story that should be told, the life after death story. I have seen very few movies that have the guts to go beyond the ordinary "bang-bang you're dead" plot and focus on what happens to the murder victim after the funeral.James Van Praagh has made a life (and one presumes a great living) out of talking to dead people, writing books about talking to dead people, and taking rich people on expensive cruises to exotic places where he talks to more dead people. That's cool for him, but I expected more out a movie about dead people that he produced.So why does this movie act like an ordinary yawner of a murder mystery that gives us absolutely diddly insight into the spirit of the victim? Couldn't we for once have a more intelligent treatment of this subject? If there are spirits, and as far as this movie was concerned, there are, then the spirit in this movie has a great story. She survived murder! So we really don't have to spend two hours in a melodrama to figure out who killed her. Let's get to the good stuff.What was murder like when she left her physical body? What happened when she realized that death was a transition, not a termination? What did she learn about being murdered after she realized that murder didn't kill her? I am so surprised that James Van Praagh gave his seal of approval to this annoying waste of time.

I wanted to like this movie. I did really. It tried hard. And why shouldn't CBS give us a spooky Sunday movie near Halloween? Still, with a feminine heroine in a new marriage, learning another family's secrets, it just seemed reminiscent of a classic Gothic novel (maybe it should have been a period piece - naw, everyone thinks those cost too much).There's a real effort in the direction to give an unsettling atmosphere, but it had a little too much quick cutting (to keep people interested who have short attention spans?). Anne Heche gives a more honest and effective performance than other actresses that might have opted for this project. But many in the cast - such as Christopher Guest and Jonathan LaPaglia - are playing characters that were not written with much originality. The plot makes sense, and there are the obligatory scenes of hallucination. Nice set design and photography. Yet Kathleen Quinlan and David Andrews seemed too young to be playing Jonathan La Paglia's parents.A distraction, a good effort, not bad - but not much that's different.If you like ghost movies with a murder mystery like this I suggest:David Koepp's "Stir of Echoes" (1999) with Kevin Bacon - based on Richard Matheson's novel (overshadowed because it was released near the same time as The Sixth Sense) or Sam Raimi's "The Gift" (2000) co-written by Billy Bob Thorton - the unexpectedly solid performances from a rather varied group of actors - Cate Blanchett, Giovani Ribisi, Keanu Reeves, Greg Kinnear, Hillary Swank and the late Michael Jeter - make this unique.