The Phantom Library

This is one of the most legendary absolute wrecks in the world of films based on the Phantom story, and it deserves that reputation, but before we get into that, let’s talk about its checkered history for a moment.

Angel of Music was originally conceived of as a period adaptation of the original novel, advertised as being more faithful to Leroux’s work than any other film had been to date. It achieved some modest crowdfunding success for the project in large part because, unlike any other film before it, it directly reached out and catered to fans of the story. The director frequently posted and corresponded online in various fan communities, hyping up his movie and encouraging fans to show support for it, and it was a hot topic of discussion for a while.

Unfortunately, the Achilles heel of all indie film projects - funding - could not be defeated, mostly because the film had very few investors and your average online fan of the Phantom story was hardly a millionaire capable of supporting production costs. Development stalled, and the filmmakers decided that the lavish sets, effects, and costumes required by a period adaptation were beyond them, so it was rewritten into a modern-day thriller based on the Phantom story and the final release bore very little resemblance to the original pitch.

It would be easy to blame fans, outraged that they were getting a very different film than they had been promised, for being overly harsh about this movie as a result. Some of them probably were. But it is very difficult to be overly harsh about a movie that is so spellbindingly bad - badly acted, badly written, badly produced, badly marketed, in fact a perfect storm of pinnacle-level badness - that even people who watch so-bad-it’s-good cult hits don’t want to suffer through it.

(By the way, this is a very surface-level run through the saga of this film’s conception, production, and reception. There was at one point a book published by John Woosley detailing everything about the production, but it has gone out of print and I was never able to get a copy, so it anyone out there has one, please tell me what kind of theoretical firstborn you’d like in exchange because I would dearly love to know more about what I am sure was a ton of other stuff going on behind the scenes. It's always worth remembering that this movie was made by beginning filmmakers on a shoestring budget, but unfortunately that can only excuse so many things.)

Anyway, this is a terrible, terrible movie. It’s beyond the pale of bad. It’s so bad it sends me groping for adjectives to quantify the majestic amount of its badness. So we’ll just have to take it one piece at a time.

The film uses title cards at both the beginning and the end to give the audience the basic setup of the story and its denouement, which seems like a more than obvious homage to the cards in the 1925 Julian/Chaney film, which as a silent movie needed them whenever information could not be conveyed through visuals alone. Absolutely hilariously, the cards here use the Crackhouse font to make them look dangerous and edgy, and possibly because it looks superficially similar to the broken-mirror font used by the Lloyd Webber musical on its posters.

Also, I’m being generous when I say “title cards”. I really mean “one subtitle in that hard-to-read font with no drop shadow, background, or enclosure”, which is clearly meant to evoke the 1925 title cards but has failed in most of their goals, such as “be readable”.

But what is the CONTENT of the title cards/subtitles, you ask? Well, it’s an explanation of how the story of the Phantom of the Opera is a true one, and how “there were rumors” that Christine gave birth to a child (I… assume so, because she got married and probably tried to?), and that there is a CULT that was formed to PROTECT CHRISTINE’S BLOODLINE.

Yes, this movie is literally Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera + Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, only miles more terrible than either one of them. IT’S REAL AND WE’RE WATCHING IT.

None of this makes sense, of course, from the outset. Okay, so Christine had a child… so why is that weird? Why does anyone care and how do they care enough to form a cult to keep the existence of Christine’s descendents a secret? Christine was just an opera singer, not even particularly big-time before all the crimes started happening around her. What on earth do we care that she procreated? 

Since my confused shouting into the void can’t change it, we’re left theorizing. Okay, so if we say that Christine having descendents is somehow important, what could be so important about them? Are they world-class superlative singers? That seems doubtful when there is a literal cult trying to keep their existence a secret, which doesn’t mesh well with them having public performance careers. Are they inheriting some kind of de Chagny super-estate or super-wealth or super-title or just some secret artifact he had? I guess, maybe, but the French aristocracy was on its way out in Raoul’s time, and anyway, everyone repeatedly emphasizes that these are Christine’s descendents, which implies that she’s the important link here, not Raoul. You could also assume that maybe the idea is that her child’s father was the Phantom rather than Raoul, but there’s the same problem there of emphasizing Christine herself, and even if so, why do we care about him having kids, either?

I suppose it’s kind of merciful, in a way, that the movie so spectacularly fails to explain its own basic plot. It could be worse. If they forget to tell us anyone’s motivations, those motivations can’t be racist or ableist or something.

The cult is introduced here via these subtitles long before they are identifiably onscreen. I say identifiably because they’re definitely around, but the movie is terrible at foreshadowing and dramatic tension, so often it’s difficult to tell if these actors are trying to be menacing or just, like, standing around waiting for lunch. It’s a mistake to introduce the cult via subtitle at the beginning, which tells the audience the core mystery of the movie at the beginning and totally undercuts any later suspense… but since if the film hadn’t we would have no idea whatsoever what the fuck was going on, I suppose it was unavoidable.

The cult - which, by the way, is not at any point named, which is weird because people in these kinds of groups like to give themselves names like the Daaé Cult or the Phantom Cult or whatever, but no, it’s just the CULT, always capitalized like someone is bellowing it at us - makes absolutely zero sense. It will never improve. It will never get better. It will continue to make negative amounts of sense throughout the movie. It will, in fact, manage to continuously top itself when it comes to illogical nonsense. Here, at the beginning, we’re mostly just wondering why they have to use “terror and violence”, as the subtitle says, to protect this bloodline.

From something, or someone, I guess? I have no idea. The film fails to tell us who, exactly is the danger to the bloodline. Why did a cult have to form to protect Christine’s offspring? Who is out there determined to murder these opera babies and what is their fucking problem? The CULT is apparently murderous in pursuit of defending the secret of the Daaé line but FROM WHOM, MOVIE? YOU CAN’T DEFEND THINGS FROM LITERALLY NO ONE.

I guess putting Christine into the role literally occupied by the woman who gave birth to the child of Jesus of Nazareth in Brown’s novel is one way to highlight her in a Christ role. It’s not one that makes sense, but there it is.

Anyway, our protagonist is Eric Nelson, a man with a significant name that I’m sure will in no way affect anything in the plot to come. He is played by Doug Kisgen, who is one of the most competent actors in the film, which is a crushing thing to realize because he is wooden and rangeless and generally incredibly boring to watch. The film actually doubles down on this, throughout forcing us to sit through long montage scenes of Eric sitting around reading books, writing notes, and looking at his computer screen.

Eric is a reporter, you see, although this information was extraordinarily difficult to learn because no one mentions it until a third of the way through the film and by this point we’ve all just had to accept that he must be the sort of person who has lost control of his life and just spends all day trying to find new information on the latest all-consuming conspiracy theory. But no, he’s a reporter, and he’s researching the legend of the Phantom of the Opera and the mysterious behavior of the conspiracy surrounding the cult of Christine’s rumored child. Why? Who knows? The movie does not bother telling us where he even heard about this bizarre idea.

If you wondered how professional reporters do their research, the answer is apparently to go to the nonfiction section of their local public libraries and sit earnestly on the beige carpeting, reading books from the general collection that obviously contain information that can lead any casual observer closer to this super duper ancient secret cult that no one believes in or has ever been able to catch up to. For further entertainment, other people will provide Eric with almost all of the research he actually uses in the movie, leaving us wondering what he was reading during all these interminable shots of him sitting on the floor, staring into library-bound covers with intense concentration.

Several minutes into this movie, there has been no dialogue and no action and all we have done is read some subtitles while Eric walks around, concerned that the CULT is lurking somewhere around the 1970s tan metal shelving in this public library, because clearly they just monitor the collection to see when someone checks out Cults of Nineteenth Century France and Where to Find Them and then come a-running for assassinations. In one of many, many moments that truly highlight the vastly low-budget nature of this film, there are holiday lights still visible on the library walls behind him as he leaves.

I’d like to pause here to talk about production values, which I largely mention to tell you that there aren’t any. Filming is obviously done with less than state-of-the-art equipment, sound editing is painfully abysmal and the viewer is constantly subjected to wild volume swings and background noise, and the cinematography switches between two default states of “deadly boring static shots with poor mise en scène” and “long pans that suggest things are important but in actuality they are not”. This was an indie movie, and it shows - and unfortunately not in a charming, seams-showing but creativity-brimming kind of way. It actually feels a little unfair to be so hard on some of these actors, considering that no one could possibly come off well with this kind of presentation, but truly, this is a movie where everyone is terrible all together, all the time.

We learn, when things finally start happening, that Eric is a reporter for The Epoch, a local daily newspaper. This is obviously a reference to La Belle Époque, the period of French history between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, during which the Phantom story takes place (and during which it was written!). I feel like I shouldn’t even have to mention, at this point, that we will not learn very much about The Epoch and what we do learn will be wildly contradictory and frankly extraterrestrial.

We now meet our other main character: Kristen, a blonde woman, who is saying goodbye to her mother as she leaves her apartment and is bumped into by a random average-looking dank college student who gazes significantly at her as she exits the elevator. I have not left out any context that would make any of this make reasonable sense. Kristen is obviously our Christine character for the movie and has the same blonde hair as her Swedish antecedent, although that doesn’t mean much in this movie (Eric is also a very pale blond, while the man who will turn out to be the Raoul character has dark, curly hair).

If you’re wondering who Kristen is, what she does or how she fits into all of this, you will be pleased to know that, once again, apparently it’s none of our business. It will take a long-ass time to figure out how she’s related to the other characters, and an even longer time to be forced, as the audience, to confront the fact that what she does is nothing and who she is is also nothing, because welcome to yet another film Christine who exists to get yelled at and kidnapped but is not supposed to be, you know, a person.

That’s enough to doom the character, but just in case we needed more, she is actually played by three actresses, none of whom are inspiring. Sylvia Niccum, who provides the character’s singing voice, is the least offensive just because she isn’t present much and while she’s obviously still growing into her instrument, her singing is passable most of the time. Lisa Mader is the woman we actually see onscreen, and unfortunately she’s even more dead-faced and wooden an actor than Kisgen, and she isn’t aided by the fact that she is also, for some reason, dubbed completely over on all her lines by a third actress, the uncredited Lindsey McKee. I have no idea why this happened, as Mader is clearly speaking English and other actors in scenes with her are audible on tape without being overdubbed. My best guess is that she might have had an accent that the director didn’t want the character to have, but if so, McKee, who splits her time between flat American and vaguely British accents, isn’t much of an improvement. I’m heavily reminded of the dubbing fiasco in the Argento/Barberini film, where the original actors’ Italian accents were deemed too hard for American audiences to understand but the ensuing English dubs were so terrible that the movie was booed at film festivals.

No actress could possibly fight off that much rampant disadvantage, so unfortunately, Kristen is absolutely not fun to watch or listen to or have to think about at any point in this film.

Meanwhile, Eric has just said hello to Meg, a brunette who is apparently his secretary or possibly a junior reporter (once again… that’s right, the movie didn’t tell us because it is awful at its own plot and setting and also doesn’t care about any of its female characters at all). Meg’s presence tells us rather obviously that Lloyd Webber’s musical is a major influence on this film, since she was very much not particularly important in Leroux’s novel and had a much larger role in the stage show, but we’ll go on talking very seriously about Leroux’s book as if this isn’t happening anyway. Meg’s first lines are used to announce that she is “now an expert in Gaston Leroux”, whose name she mispronounces as she says it. It’s almost too funny not to be on purpose. Also hilarious is the implication that she literally just learned things to become an expert, as if she has run in from the next room to announce that she finished the entire Wikipedia article and is armed with knowledge.

Possibly the most easily forgivable part of this movie is its earnest insistence that Leroux’s novel was nonfiction, that he sincerely claimed it was a true story, and that the Phantom truly existed and has simply been forgotten a century later. It’s a cliché because it comes up so much, but it’s a perfectly valid option for the background to this kind of a story, and following up on Leroux’s own conceit of the story claiming it was true in spite of obviously being fiction is a nice inheritance.

The conversation tries desperately to inject some suspense about the CULT and some sort of danger, but fails due to, well, everything about the entire movie. Honorable mention goes to Meg asking Eric if it doesn’t seem strange that no one has “looked into this” until now, and him agreeing while being determined to become the first, despite the fact that apparently even in the beginning research phase they already know about this “rumored” baby and the CULT and therefore obviously other people ALSO KNEW SO THEY COULD WRITE IT DOWN FOR YOU, YOU DINGUSES.

Cut to Kristen, who is lip-syncing extremely badly to Niccum’s singing, wandering vaguely and blankly around on an opera stage as if she is a roomba who has no idea how she got here or what she’s supposed to be doing with her life. It is hugely not clear that this is a flashback, which led to me spending the first half of the movie thinking that Kristen was a singer who was auditioning for roles; I only figured out that she wasn’t later when this particular flashback was revisited and I realized it was supposed to be set in the 19th century. WHEN EVEN ARE WE.

The problem here, obviously, is that the movie is doing some sort of time thing - time travel, flashbacks, hallucinations, whatever - but it didn’t think to tell its viewers that, so the scene literally makes no sense and somehow manages to make this already absolutely disastrous film even more of a wreck.

Also, please remember that since this is a flashback that is clearly referencing the original story, we still don’t know any more about Kristen because apparently this isn’t something she’s actually doing.

I will say that while the opera house set is obviously a green-screen graphic, it’s nice and atmospheric and the characters are nicely integrated into it. It’s also dark and empty and foreboding and the fact that Christine is here alone singing for exactly two dudes is not encouraging, but one horror story at a time, please.

Back with Eric, investigative journalist surpassed by none, he is… attending a lecture in a dreary drop-ceilinged classroom that is probably a real one at a local community college, where a man in a sweater-vest has apparently been delivering a class on Leroux’s novel. I really do understand the difficulty of showing research in a compelling narrative way in a movie, but going to the local public library to read commonly available books? Listening to a Literature 101 lecture on the novel? This is research for babies.

The professor reads the final passage of the novel (obviously from the de Mattos translation) dramatically aloud and then we have an absolutely hilarious interaction in which Eric corners him after class and intensely explains that he needs physical evidence to prove that Erik ever actually died. I legitimately can’t tell if he thinks Erik is immortal or is just bad at explaining what he’s doing here. The professor, Dr. Persing, is played by John Redmond, who has decided that he will have exactly one character trait and that trait will be UNSTOPPABLE INTENSITY, so get ready for him to always look exactly like he’s explaining to you how he’s going to perform a hideous torturous medical experiment on you in a warehouse when he’s actually talking about things like what to order for dinner. I do not believe he blinked even one time in any scene he is in for the duration of this film. Persing takes Eric’s tin-foil-hatted demands extremely seriously and tells him he should check out the “original manuscript” for more clues, which is entertaining because first of all, the original manuscript is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France along with all of Leroux’s other original documents so I guess you’re flying to France and impersonating a grad student, buddy, and second of all, it’s not even clear whether he’s talking about Leroux’s manuscript or the Persian’s, which of course they are all very serious about having actually existed.

I mean, the Persian is in this movie, and that’s more than we can say about literally any others to date with the exception of the 1988 animated film and the dubious inclusion of the 1925 movie’s whitewashed “Inspector Ledoux”. Is this a triumph or an even worse blow to this neglected character? I don’t know that we can answer that question.

In case you wanted to have a good time with this completely bonkers conversation, the movie makes sure to ruin it by having some of Kisgen’s lines clearly dubbed into the scene later for some reason. It’s still recognizably Kisgen, but the abysmal difference in sound quality, bass level, and background noise is painful and jarring.

The manuscript, whichever one it is, however, was STOLEN, Eric apparently already knows and Persing agrees. I assume this is evidence of activity on the part of the CULT, but it’s hard to take seriously. Lots of people might steal a super unique manuscript of a classic piece of literature to sell at auction or to a collector or just for themselves, and also, the fact that it was apparently randomly owned by a guy named Jacques Rousseau, a name that is once again so funny that it’s devastatingly hard to believe it wasn’t on purpose, who appears to be… no one? I mean, his name is obviously significant, so you can assume we’ll be meeting him, but who he is or why he had this manuscript in the first place is not explained. The plot doesn’t so much stagger on as crawl, wormlike, lacking appendages.

JACQUES ROUSSEAU. I really did have to pause the film here. Is this supposed to evoke world explorer and inventor of the Aqualung Jacques Cousteau, primarily famous for his invention and incredible documentary materials? It has to be, right? But that doesn’t make any sense. Are these just the only French names the filmmakers knew? SOMEONE NEEDS TO FOOTNOTE THIS WHOLE MOVIE.

Eric declares that, since he can’t find the manuscript, he’ll talk to “family members” next, which is again wildly unclear - your family members, Eric? Leroux’s? Rousseau’s? - but which is pushed back against by Persing, eyes boring into Eric’s face as he considers ways to peel it off and use it in artwork, declaring that you can’t always trust family. He’s obviously in the CULT (because clearly a small-time community college professor is prime CULT material, especially when he’s actively lecturing on Leroux and giving people clues about the very thing the CULT is sworn to protect), but his justification to Eric that family members don’t just fucking blurt out weird family history to strangers and/or reporters is way more legitimate than the general level of the dialogue here. As if to underscore how bad he is at being in the CULT, he then gives Eric a contact - lo and behold, Rousseau himself.

I mean, we could assume that Persing is not in the CULT and is only a helpful dude whose eyes have seen the shrieking death of a thousand forgotten victims, but we’d have to be as oblivious as Eric and Kristen to pull that off, and no one is as oblivious as Eric and Kristen.

Eric, the greatest reporter of all time, only asks Rousseau one question, which is why the stolen manuscript was “so valuable”, which is an absolutely ridiculous choice if you can only ask one question as a reporter. Predictably, Rousseau says something along the lines of “it was an original handwritten manuscript of a famous work of literature, loser, that’s something people would like to have”, so he learns nothing.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that Eric finds Rousseau just… standing on the street somewhere? I have no idea what was on that card with “contact information” Persing gave him, because he just rolls up on the guy as if he were an NPC in a single-player computer RPG. Rousseau is wearing a full suit and using a push broom to sweep a deserted, obviously green-screened sidewalk in front of an empty closed store. What are we implying here? Is Rousseau the world’s best-dressed street sweeper, a career that has not been viable since the Great Depression? Does he own the dismal and apparently abandoned dark building behind him? Are we trying to say that the loss of this manuscript DESTROYED HIS ENTIRE CAREER, whatever that actually was? It’s like I’m watching something trying to do a postmodern deconstruction, but actually the deconstruction is of the audience’s will to live.

This movie never wastes a chance to make sure there is absolutely no suspense in its suspense thriller, so after Eric leaves - literally, he is not even two yards away yet - Rousseau pulls out his old flip phone and ominously calls someone, making it clear that he is in the CULT and reporting this DANGEROUS MAN who is TOO CLOSE TO THE TRUTH. Report Persing while you’re at it, bro. Nothing any of you do makes any sense.

It’s at this point that we discover that Kristen and Eric are apparently romantically involved and live together, a fact that was not apparent given that the only information we have ever gotten was Eric glancing briefly at a photo of her on his desk at work, which was not exactly illuminating given that she is desperately obviously the focus of his research, even if he hasn’t figured that out yet. I bring this up because the first time they interact is a shot in which Kristen is asleep on the couch in her apartment and Eric appears to creepily lean over her while a thunderstorm rages outside, which is a huge horror movie setup and I was extremely concerned that he was going to do something horrifying before I eventually figured out that this was not intentional.

Instead, what’s intentional is illustrating that their relationship isn’t going well by having them have a fight, in which Kristen (I guess she was waiting up for him, thus why she was sleeping on the couch?) gets upset at him for being out all night and he refuses to tell her what he was doing. Yes, this is SECRET research, and his only justification for not telling her anything and refusing to answer his phone is “I was WORKING”, so just pack your shit and leave, Kristen, this is absolutely not about to get better. Worse, it’s implied for the first time that Eric may be an alcoholic, because Kristen assumes that he was out drinking from the evidence of his shoes. I have no idea what his shoes look like or why they suggest drinking. The film doesn’t even bother to give us a shot of his shoes. But Kristen flatly declaims, “Your SHOES,” before getting upset, so… the shoes are definitely involved somehow.

After they give up on their fight, which is incredibly boring because it’s being performed by two actors who couldn’t impersonate mannequins at a department store trying to repeat dialogue written by an AI that can almost but not quite pass the Turing Test, they go to bed and it’s time for more dream sequences, this time with Kristen back in the opera house but the curly-haired college student who was Gazing Meaningfully At Her before also there, wearing period garb and watching her sing. That scene cuts immediately to another one, this time a childhood scene familiar to anyone who has read Leroux’s novel, in which a young Christine with a very prominent red scarf that she is wearing in a manner in which no one has ever worn a scarf in the history of the world loses it only to have young Raoul save it and return it to her. The child actors are the best actors in this piece and that should tell you all you need to know.

So, apparently, the weird staring college student who lives in Eric’s and Kristen’s building is supposed to be the Raoul character? We have no idea what his name is or why he’s here or where he came from or even why he’s staring at Kristen beyond maybe that he thinks she’s hot, but there he is, being identical to the Raoul in the flashbacks. 

The identical characters suggest that Kristen is a descendent of the original Christine while this kid is a descendent of the original Raoul… and if that’s the case, we’ve got some theorizing to do. So is the CULT actually a sort of Raoul versus Erik situation, with Raoul’s descendents hiding Christine and her descendents from the man (and descendents because this is a movie that can never have enough descendents) who terrorized her? I am kind of here for Raoul, Cultmaster Extraordinaire, who created an entire secret society to keep Erik and his offspring from finding and fucking up his family line. That’s sort of brilliant. It’s also hilarious, if Eric is literally living with Kristen and still desperately trying to find the Daaé Descendents because he’s just that bad at this.

Of course, maybe this isn’t about descendents. Maybe Kristen is dreaming about a past life, or a sort of ancestral memory. But the CULT is all about Christine’s lineage, so that doesn’t work out, except that everyone being identical makes way less sense if it’s all about descendents because hello, genetics. Are the original characters reincarnating into their descendents somehow, thus returning me to the second Meadows novel in a move that I never thought anyone would want to make for any reason whatsoever? And if everyone is reincarnating, how did they all manage to accidentally show up at the same place at the same time with no idea what’s happening?

This movie doesn’t care about telling you trifles like what in the fuck is going on, so instead, TO THE GRAVEYARD!

There are a lot of rain sounds and some ominous thunder in the graveyard, but Kisgen remains perfectly dry as he wanders around staring at things and long, static shots threaten to knock out any intrepid viewers who have remained awake thus far. He eventually discovers a lovely mausoleum (even if it is clearly CGI), with the inscription E. DAAE along the top. The wind is absolutely fucking with the camera mic, but I guess that’s kind of atmospheric?

While Eric freaks out about this discovery and calls Meg to demand she do more research (side note: who is Meg, anyway? is she another reporter at his paper? his assistant? a staff researcher? why is she doing all this work for this douchebag? also, he does not spell the name Daaé he wants her to look up so GOOD LUCK MEG), I had lots of time in among the very poor choices of long shots to think about how this would mean that either Christine had her children out of wedlock or else they took their mother’s surname for some reason, and somehow her family line either got really lucky until it hit Kristen and was all boys who could carry on the family name, or else all the women in it from the 1800s on down retained their maiden names or never married but still had kids. It’s all a little improbable, is what I’m saying.

I mean, also, there could be more than one person named Daaé in the world, Eric. A quick internet search tells me there are hundreds of Daaés in the world, primarily in Norway and Denmark, but I think we already know where your research level is.

A related question: where is this movie actually set? Somewhere in the United States, presumably, because the accents are all American except for Kristen’s about 25% of the time, but that’s all the information we’re going to get. Somewhere fairly temperate with green-lawn graveyards and tiny underfunded libraries. That’s all we’ve got. I’m going to go with Ohio, because it’s not like anything will contradict me.

You know what’s neat? We get to see the original Erik for a second in a flashback here, and his mask is pretty cool!

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It may be obviously made with gaffer tape, but it’s still more Leroux-accurate than many we’ve seen, possibly as a holdover from the film’s original plans to be a period-accurate retelling. It’s full-faced, black, and looks homemade but serviceable, and a black tear of blood runs from the eyehole which is just too goth for words. We get this brief flashback when Eric first sees the mausoleum and he responds to it by dramatically yelling, so presumably he is also a descendent/reincarnation/person of interest here.

A really sad aspect of this movie, considering its purported “plot”, is its complete lack of information about Christine herself. This is supposed to be all about her - her life, her child, her descendents, her legacy - but I have no frigging clue what happened after the events of Leroux’s story and wouldn’t even know those if I hadn’t read the book before watching this cinematographical Hindenburg unfold. This is a sequel, albeit one set much later, and one in which Christine is important - so who is she? Did she marry Raoul, or anyone else? How did she take care of herself? When did she have a child, and with whom, and how did she take care of them? How did she gain a whole family line for this cult to protect, and how and when did they come to the Americas?

We’ll never find any of this out. Christine is just a womb who was in proximity to a famous story in this movie, which is even worse than her usual treatment in sequels, and Kristen isn’t helping since she doesn’t get any characterization or development either beyond not liking Eric staying out all night and ignoring her.

Here’s another question about the women in this film: where are Meg’s flashbacks? We’ve had Kristen and Eric and the currently unnamed Raoul neighbor all seeing their past lives, but when does Meg get to remember any of these? Why is she important enough that she has to be here and be involved in the plot, but not important enough to actually be a participant in it? We could do some sort of hand-wavey, wiggly pseudo-justifications about supernatural things and fate and lifetimes and all that to explain her presence, but then why hasn’t she gotten flashbacks to her part in this tale? We could also perhaps guess that Meg might be in the CULT and thus a spy planted to keep Eric away from the truth, which would be fabulous since it would imply that the Girys were in on Raoul’s secret society plans to protect his spawn, but that’s just a thing we’re theorizing.

I’ll spoil it for you: Meg never gets any flashbacks. In fact, after one more brief and confusing appearance in the movie, she’ll never even appear again, and she certainly won’t matter. She’s also no one, here just to be a moving set piece and do Eric’s research for him so he can dramatically stride around graveyards instead. And that just puts the final nail in the coffin for this movie: it has four major female characters (we’ll get to the fourth later) and none of them matter worth a single damn. Whomever wrote this literally made them into plot objects and then ignored them.

CHEERFUL. Also cheerful is the question of whether Eric suspects that Kristen is descended from Christine, and whether or not this is a thing he started investigating before or after beginning a relationship with her, all very important details when trying to figure out exactly how creepy he is being. If he doesn’t know or suspect anything, that’s a hell of a coincidence. If he started a relationship with Kristen to get close to her when he suspected she was a Daaé, that’s a big old terrifying red flag. If he didn’t but started secretly investigating her background while refusing to tell her about it after they were already together, that’s… not really better?

Flashback time again: Christine and Raoul run happily along a shoreline and kiss. A weird pan into the blurry distance seems like it was originally going to show the Phantom spying on them, but it doesn’t, which results in the objectively hilariously bad moment when the camera moves from the happy couple, zooms in on a blurry bunch of leaves, and then just sits there before cutting while ominous music plays.

In the present day, Eric is in the library AGAIN, now highlighting inside library books like the worst person in the world that he is, but I can’t get too mad about that because I’m too busy laughing at this edition of the Epoch superimposed over the scene with the headline MYSTERY CULT KILLS THREE PEOPLE. It’s followed by the headline PHANTOM: FACT OR FICTION?, which I have to assume Eric himself wrote. Oh, and we also have CHRISTINE DAAÉ HAS CHILD… That’s it. That’s the whole headline.

I desperately need to know who this DAILY NEWSPAPER’S intended audience is. Is this like the National Enquirer but without the fun pictures which are, let’s face it, at least 50% of its draw? Are these current editions of the Epoch, or are they from some sort of archive, which begs the question of when they were published and who besides Eric was ridiculous enough to write them. Does Eric not have an editor? WHY AREN’T THEY STOPPING HIM?

Is… is Eric just publishing the Epoch by himself out of his garage and leaving it in local businesses who are too nice to tell him not to before they throw it away after he leaves? How on earth is this a real daily newspaper? The film made a big point of having Rousseau say he’d heard of the paper before earlier, likely to lend it legitimacy and stop this exact line of questioning, but that is just not even close enough to good enough to overcome the sheer volume of wackiness on display.

Look, cult suspense thrillers require some suspension of disbelief, but it doesn’t work this way. Yes, the viewer has to accept the idea that perhaps there is some sort of secret society they’ve never heard of running things, but for them to do so, they have to see society as it is and be able to see where the connections might be. If whatever’s going on is wildly ridiculous, it doesn’t look like the real world and therefore we can’t believe the suspense because nothing makes any sense. Also, it makes both Eric and the CULT look like they’re in the middle of a clown car routine that we have the misfortune of witnessing after having taken a wrong turn at the county fair.

This research montage goes on somehow for twice as long as the first one, making it roughly five to six millennia in length. Niccum is singing over the whole thing again, but unfortunately this time it’s a more pop-flavored song in English (“Myth Angel”, track 11 on the soundtrack that you can indeed buy if you have exhausted all possible other uses for your money) and she has more obvious problems with it than she did in the opera audition earlier. It does not make the continued parade of ludicrous headlines - PHANTOM MANUSCRIPT FEARED LOST - any more palatable. (Also, filmmakers, we already got all these plot points. You’re literally just wasting our time now. We already know all this and so does Eric. There’s no point in showing us again.)

This sequence is interspersed with shots of Kristen reaching critical levels of Fed Up with Eric’s refusal to show up at home, communicate with her in any way, or tell her what the fuck he’s doing all the time, so at this point I hope she does run away with the college student neighbor. It’s what he deserves.

After a moment of peak comedy in which we see Kisgen determinedly typing away at a keyboard before the camera accidentally pans up and we can see the black, inactive monitor, another headline comes up: WHO WAS CHRISTINE’S TRUE LOVER? Movie, you have got to tell me what is going on with the Epoch. What on earth does that have to do with anything? Why are you running celebrity gossip from 1880s France? And why must you come in here and ruin my excellent theory about Raoul, Cultist Supreme, by suggesting like every other tiresome sequel ever that Christine’s children must be fathered by Erik?

(Um, if Christine’s children are Erik’s, I’m not sure I like where we’re going in regards to this Eric and Kristen relationship. Oh, dear.)

We get a moment when Eric pours maybe one whole ounce of vodka into his mug while working during this montage, so apparently that’s supposed to confirm that yes, he does have a drinking problem and Kristen is right, because behold, The Poison Hath Touched His Lips and there is no going back. This would work if Eric were a recovered alcoholic falling off the wagon in his pursuit here, maybe, but that would have required actually characterizing him or giving him any backstory before he sprang full-formed from the 1970s carpeting of the Johnsonville County Public Library.

LEROUX, PHANTOM AUTHOR, MURDERED? This is my favorite part. Leroux was murdered because he KNEW TOO MUCH. About Christine and her bloodline. He tried to tell the world but he was SILENCED. I mean, by all accounts he died at home in his sleep with his wife nearby, but you can’t prove a negative, so sure, why not say he was murdered by DAAÉ CULTISTS?

I’m making a lot of fun of these headlines, because obviously it is physically impossible not to while remaining conscious, but I’m actually very glad they’re here. Otherwise, this would be an interminable montage of Kisgen trying to look very serious at pieces of paper and intermittently pinning printouts of articles we just saw to his wall in their entirety with absolutely no order or organization whatsoever, and it’s important to be able to laugh at CULT STRIKES AGAIN: PARIS, NEW YORK to save your brain melting out of your ears. The brief mention of New York might be a shout-out to Forsyth’s 1999 sequel novel, which was set in New York and featured Christine and the Phantom both in the Americas and Christine’s child being Erik’s, and if so, somehow this movie found a way to tie itself to one of the most hated adaptations of the story ever just in case a stone was left unturned here.

This cult is amazing. Look at all these headlines. It’s the least secret cult ever to exist and apparently everyone knows about it. Or else it’s just Eric, publishing his Phantom Cult newspaper alone in his garage while Kristen wonders upstairs what went wrong with her life.

I really do love this shot near the end of the montage where Kisgen dramatically reaches out and taps a picture of the Palais Garnier that he has tacked to his wall. Just, like, so we know it’s there.

We’ve survived a lot of this movie, right? It’s gone on forever. Civilizations have risen and fallen. Entire canons of literature have been written and crumbled to dust. Creatures the likes of which we will never know have developed societies on distant planets. And in this film, we are exactly fifteen minutes in.

That’s only a third of the way. Fifteen minutes.

You know, this movie was apparently originally just short of an hour and a half long, but Woosley cut it down to forty-five minutes, citing that it was too “confusing” for the audience at the longer length. Setting aside the psychedelia of trying to imagine how this could possibly have been more confusing, I honestly can’t decide whether or not to mourn this decision. On the one hand, the longer cut might have explained some of the massively gaping plot holes and given some of the characters something approaching an existence. On the other hand, I cannot imagine watching this movie if it were twice as long. I literally can’t.

We finally escape the montage to find Eric drinking with Persing at a bar, although whether they met up intentionally, are buddies now after having just met recently, or just bumped into each other is unclear. Eric is definitely being presented as an alcoholic, getting pissed off and defensive when he thinks Persing is asking him about his drinking habits instead of his research. It’s interesting that the film seems to be trying to use Eric’s alcoholism as a proxy for the original Erik’s mental and physical disabilities; both are certainly debilitating and can in some cases cause similar behavior, and alcoholism is just as affected by genetic factors and difficult to manage as many of the probable issues Erik faced. I wish it had done more with it, though; it feels less like the writing put any real effort into looking into a modern conception of a man struggling with a behavioral problem and more like it was just running through the standard tropes of a Tortured Man Seeking Truth But No One Believes Him Except Jim Beam.

At any rate, Persing is surprisingly cogent and even compassionate here, trying to get Eric to explain what his problem is and why he’s doing all this. Eric uses this as an opportunity to be the worst by claiming he’s doing all this for Kristen, and when Persing is surprised that she would ask him to do it, he clarifies that she didn’t ask “in words” and goes on to cry about how he used to be a successful journalist but now he doesn’t win awards for his articles anymore and that’s why Kristen doesn’t love him anymore.

ERIC. She is using words RIGHT NOW to tell you what she’s pissed off about: you drinking and staying out all night and ignoring her and refusing to share what you’re up to. Kristen has been very clear about the things that are fucking up your relationship. This man then has the gall to go on and complain that he and Kristen never talk or spend time together anymore, when the entire problem is he won’t see her, answer her phone calls, or show up at home so she can do things like, I don’t know, TALK TO HIM or SPEND TIME TOGETHER.