The shiver-inducing talents of Stephen King, David Cronenberg, and Christopher Walken meld to produce this supremely chilly supernatural thriller adaptation. Schoolteacher Johnny’s (Walken) perfect life is overturned when a horrific car accident puts him in a coma that robs him of five years of his life — and with them, his job and girlfriend Sarah (Brooke Adams), who moves on with someone else.
For anyone familiar with Cronenberg’s films, the director’s involvement might lead you to expect results from this premise as idiosyncratic as Crash or Videodrome’s, but The Dead Zone takes a decidedly more mainstream path than those works. In the place of graphic body horror is more palatable — but no less affecting — emotional bleakness, as Johnny contends with losing Sarah and a reality-warping new ability: he now has the power to see into the future of anyone he touches. While being forewarned about house fires and nuclear war might be a blessing for those whose lives he saves, Johnny struggles with the emotional burden of being responsible for preventing these future tragedies. More than any of the chilling setpieces — a frantic hunt for a serial killer, the attempted assassination of a demagogue — it’s Johnny’s grappling with this gift-slash-curse that gives The Dead Zone its fierce intensity.
"An accomplished psychological thriller."
— Variety Staff
Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher with his whole life ahead of him but, after leaving his fiancee's home one night, is involved in a car crash which leaves him in a coma for 5 years. When he wakes, he discovers he has an ability to see into the past, present and future life of anyone with whom he comes into physical contact.
Five years after being involved in a car accident, a man wakes up from a coma to find he has a supernatural ability to see into the future.
Christopher Walken’s haunted performance. He fully immerses us into Johnny’s fraught emotional journey, from his initial eagerness to help everyone he can to his complete social withdrawal amid a reluctance to shoulder such heavy burdens — and finally, a late realization of what he owes his fellow citizens. Even considering the doomsday-averting potential of his actions, Walken’s layered performance and Cronenberg’s sensitive direction mean we never lose sight of the personal sacrifice he’s making — giving The Dead Zone an acutely bittersweet edge.
The real horror might actually be Christopher Walken’s bowl cut at the beginning of this movie.
