DARK CITY

-By Maitland McDonagh

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Somewhere in a city of night that seems to have been pieced together from bits and pieces of some movie buff's dreams, a man wakes up in a hotel bathroom. There's a dead girl in the other room, and he has no idea how she got there or who she is. In fact, he has no idea who he is.

Sure, you've seen things like this before. But hang in there. The man is John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell)-at least that's what the papers in his wallet say-and he has a stunning wife named Emma (Jennifer Connelly), a lounge singer, who's worried about him. He's been acting strangely, and she's been on edge anyway because of those terrible murders that have been taking place, prostitutes with spirals carved into their flesh. There's a very peculiar doctor named Schreiber (Kiefer Sutherland) who seems to know more than he's telling, and there's a stolid detective named Bumstead (William Hurt) who's going to get to the bottom of these killings, no matter what the cost.

And then things get very strange. Murdoch is lurking around the streets of the dark city, trying to puzzle things out, when a clock strikes midnight and everything stops. Motorists slump over their steering wheels, news vendors fall asleep in their kiosks, people's heads drop into their plates of soup. And then the city begins to change, to sprout like those novelty crystals you drop into water. Buildings twist up out of the pavement, reconfiguring themselves as they grow. It's truly mind-bending, and Murdoch-of course-thinks he's going insane. The answer, he thinks, has something to do with Shell Beach-he holds onto that thought like a mental life preserver. But why won't the trains go there, and why is his childhood scrapbook suddenly filled with blank pages?

Three years have passed since Alex Proyas directed The Crow, a gloomy valentine to adolescent misery and the mystical power of love, and the shadow of Brandon Lee's accidental death has begun to pass. Dark City proves beyond a doubt that The Crow wasn't all J. O'Barr's source material or Alex McDowell's production design: It's imbued with a sensibility that's obviously Proyas', Goth by way of German Expressionism, doomed romanticism decked out in bondage gear. The members of Proyas' eclectic cast are uneven: Sewell brings a reassuring solidity to his role, and Richard O'Brien-best known as the creator of The Rocky Horror Show, and so familiar in the guise of Riff-Raff that the mere sight of him constitutes a joke in Men in Black-is sublimely creepy as Mr. Hand, the very troubled Stranger who's hot on Murdoch's heels. But William Hurt and Jennifer Connelly are wooden (all right, she's too voluptuous to be wooden, but that has nothing to do with acting), while Kiefer Sutherland teeters perilously on the edge of camp exaggeration.

Dark City's basic look is that of American crime thrillers of the '40s: men in fedoras and women with bright red lipstick (even in black and white, you knew it was scarlet), shiny, voluptuously curvy automobiles and rain-slicked streets. But its visual influences reach further, from Nosferatu to Hellraiser, Mad Love to Brazil; about the only obvious antecedent from which it doesn't draw is Blade Runner, until now the last word in sci-fi noir. Under the mystery of the murdered prostitutes and Murdoch's missing memories is a far greater mystery: Who are the Strangers, a pack of bald-headed fetishists who cluster beneath the cities in a chamber that looks uncannily like the engine room of Metropolis? The story owes more than a bit of its inspiration to Total Recall-or perhaps to Philip K. Dick's We Can Remember it for You Wholesale-but Proyas, production designer David Liddle and screenwriters Lem Dobbs (Kafka) and David S. Goyer (The Crow: City of Angels) have crafted a surprisingly haunting confection out of bits and pieces of movie memories.

--Maitland McDonagh