Like a lot of horror films, The Skeptic (out on DVD) is more interesting for what it says about contemporary society than for its depiction of the supernatural. Timothy Daly stars as Bryan Becket, a hardheaded rationalist who inherits a haunted house. He is emotionally as well as intellectually narrow and arrogant, convinced he always knows best because he is a logical positivist in a world he presumes is logical and composed entirely of material facts. Becket has chosen a perfect profession for his mentality. He’s a trial attorney.
He sees the death of his eccentric aunt, a woman he despised (not unlike his attitude toward most people) as an opportunity. Her beautifully kept Victorian Gothic house, a mansion of aggressively spiked towers and turrets, gives him the chance for a trial separation from his increasingly unhappy wife. And aside from its value as real estate, the mansion is a trove of high-end antiques. It’s also a place of strange auditory and visual phenomena. As the chilling disturbances grow more vivid, Becket resolutely chalks them up to chronic insomnia or mixing sleeping pills with scotch. Finally, he concedes, he might be cracking up. Any chance the ghosts are inside his mind, suppressed memories of childhood released by staying in his aunt’s old house?
Well, not according to the beautiful African American psychic who—in one of several improbable plot twists—decides to camp out in the Gothic mansion. As a story, The Skeptic doesn’t hold together especially well and seems to be stitched from pieces of half-developed storylines. It’s not a classic. But along with several scary moments, the character of Bryan Becket allows The Skeptic to become an interesting presentation of a prevalent personality type—the mindset that tries to reduce the complexity of reality to one easy answer.
