The Lost Room

The Lost Room

The Lost Room was a mini-series written and produced for the American Sci-Fi cable channel. It came across as an attempt at a David Lynch type story for the techno-geek audience, with a dash of “Being John Malkovich” as seasoning.

Unfortunately, it appears that the writers of the screenplay were about seventeen, as the movie barely rises above the level of a fantasy role-playing game. The story concerns a motel room that’s somehow been transported into an alternate reality. It is also a treasure hunt for a variety of everyday objects that were in the room, and exhibit some weirdly magical properties when utilized in the real world.

The plot of the story began nicely enough, hinging upon an illicit attempt to purchase the motel room key. The attempt ends in a spectacularly strange double murder, thus bringing Detective Joe Miller into the middle of the fray. Miller, played by Peter Krause of Six Feet Under fame, ends up with the key, discovers that the key will open any locked door, and will lead to the aforementioned room. His precocious eight-year-old daughter, Anna, reveals another convenient-to-the-plot piece of information. Anything left in the room disappears when the door is closed. Surprise. Surprise. She ends up an innocent victim of this magic act, thus setting the main thrust of the plotline. Detective Miller must solve the mystery of the lost room, in order to retrieve his daughter. Along the way, he will be shot at, framed, double-and-triple-crossed and flung out of the sky onto a deserted highway multiple times.

Julianna Margulies (of ER fame) provides the love interest one doesn’t quite trust, seeing that she’s one of the members of a cabal searching for the magical objects. Of course, there’s another cult competing in this effort, one that is both more ruthless and more ineffective (especially when required to move the plot along).

There’s also a coroner who was involved in the original investigation who get sucked into the vortex of strange object desire by the cult that believes the objects will reveal the thoughts of God. So he murders a cop, frames the other, sets someone on fire, kneels in prayer to a wacky deck of cards, then absconds with a couple of those precious, god-inspired objects from right under the nose of the cult he joined ten minutes ago. All in day’s work, I suppose. CSI material, he’s not.

Of course, there’s a criminal type named the Weasel searching for the objects, and a millionaire drycleaner played by Kevin Pollack also in play. Although his motivation is to cure his child of Leukemia - the boy does look ill, but curiously still has all his hair.

The cast of actors is impressive and they do their best. Ultimately, their plight is to continually look shocked or surprised or confused (I’m sure that look got easy) as events plunge them out of reality and into a motel room. Gladly, there was no sign of Norman Bates throughout the entire episodic extravaganza.