My Take on it
I rented Lost Souls Winona Ryder was apparently in it. I was not disappointed -- Winona Ryder was definitely in it. In other ways the film was less than stellar.
The look of the film is great. I'm a sucker for the grainy, dark, washed out gimmick. It can't carry a whole movie, and it certainly doesn't add any zing to an otherwise plodding and occasionally trying narrative, but if this had been the movie that the cinematography kept trying to tell us it was, it would have been a damn good movie.
The problem is that the forces of darkness don't seem to have much of a plan aside from making sure that information gets revealed with the proper dramatic timing. The story begins with an exorcism, in which Ryder's character Maya participates because her having been possessed at some time in the past supposedly qualifies her to help in a way that the movie never explains. The priests march into an asylum, strap a guy down to his chair with serious looking leather bands, open up their grips and take out holy water, crosses, rosaries, coifs and other Catholic fetishes and screw themselves up for fighting evil. It was an exciting scene that made the rest of the film seem like a letdown. Mostly it's a MacGuffin to put Maya in the room where she can happen to pick up some papers that happen to contain very specific information about who the anti-Christ is going to be (his name, in point of fact) that the demon possessed subject just happened to take it in his head to write in an easy to break code (let him who hath understanding check out the cipher of the beast -- for it is a numerical simple substitution cipher on a right-4 shift).
If I were to write a movie about the apocalypse, the first thing I would do, besides casting Winona Ryder, would be to go to the library and do some research. The writers did so little homework on this job they even stooped to faking a citation. The film starts with a phony biblical citation, Deuteronomy book 17, which supposedly says that some guy born of incest will become Satan on his 33rd birthday. There is, as you bible fans may attest, just the one book of Deuteronomy. There is a chapter 17, but it says nothing even remotely like this. The 33 is cute, since Jesus is supposed to have been crucified at 33, but while I'm no expert on biblical prophecy, I don't think it is written anywhere that somebody just up and becomes The Adversary. I strongly suspect you have to be born that way, but what the hell? I'm all for them reinventing the story, but they really ought to know what the story was in the first place before they try it.
Doesn't everybody know by now that if you want to find the Anti-Christ, you add up the Greek (or Latin, or Hebrew -- whichever gets you the right results) numbers in his name and if it comes out to 666, he's busted? Well, in this film the beast's name is Peter Kelson. Try and get six hundred threescore six out of that, comrade. Instead, they just have the letters XES appear in visions, which is grounds for the only humor in the film, as it is you-know-what spelled backwards, and this is claimed to be 666 in Greek. More shoddy research. Indeed, the Greeks did use letters to represent numbers, but the writers missed the fact that the little symbol that represents 60 is not an E, or even the Greek equivalent epsilon. It's xi, which in the lower case is a squiggle that they apparently mistook for the Latin character E. This was not a mistake a character made. In Maya's evil bathroom vision, the letters are clearly carved out in Latin block letters. The psychic, whose only role in the film is to do a drive-by exposition, explains the significance of the letters and he also refers to the xi as an E. Clearly, the writers didn't know the difference.
As Maya finds more and more of the truth conveniently falling into her lap, the forces of darkness start screwing with her mind, to no clear purpose. They don't seem to be trying very hard, although I kept expecting a pane of glass would come along and cut Maya's head off. I don't suppose the writers even bothered to watch other movies about the Anti-Christ for a decent rip-off.
I don't want to give away the ending, for those who care, but try to imagine this: you're watching Star Wars, and the rebels fuel their X-wing fighters and suit up and as they fly out they happen to run into a huge clutch of tie-fighters, but they fly past them and never see them again, and then when they get to the Death Star Luke gets a computer prompt that says, "Destroy Death Star (Y/N)?" He hits `Y' and the movie ends.
My recommendation:
Winona Ryder is achingly beautiful in it, so go buy the DVD.