It is at 9:05 p.m., this January 5, 2023 on W9, that is broadcast Premonitions, directed in 2015 by Brazilian filmmaker Afonso Poyart. In this thriller, Anthony Hopkins plays John Clancy, a psychic doctor who comes to the aid of two FBI agents tracking down a serial killer, played by Colin Farrell. Which turns out to have the same gift as Clancy! Hopkins and Farrell, who had already been reunited in 2004 in alexander by Oliver Stone, come together for this film which was originally to be the sequel to the mythical Seven. But its troubled genesis was going to thwart this project.
When Prémonitions moves away from its model
You have to go back to the 1990s to see two screenwriters, Tedd Griffin and Sean Bailey, write the story of a serial killer defeating FBI agents, until the intervention, at their request, of a medium . Company that produced Seven in 1995, New Line Cinema bought the rights to the screenplay with the intention of amending it in order to make it a sequel to David Fincher’s masterpiece. In the idea of the producers, Fincher would return to the staging, while Morgan Freeman would endorse, again, the waistcoat and raincoat of Inspector Somerset. But the first categorically refuses the offer made to him, while the second is hired for a comparable role in The Spider Mask to a pretext allowing him to avoid it. From there, the project fell apart before being regularly relaunched. It is thus successively proposed to Nick Cassavetes, who hesitates and declines, to the director of clips Miguel Sapochnik, to the great Paul Verhoven, then to Mark Pellington. None follow up. Finally, the screenplay, renamed solace (in other words ‘consolation’) finds a taker in the person of Afonso Poyart, with Anthony Hopkins in the role of the doctor endowed with mediumistic powers… but without a direct link to Seven.
The continuation under this advertisement
An unjustified failure?
With 22 million dollars in revenue (compared to 327 million for David Fincher’s film), Premonitions, despite its sexy poster, is not the expected success. Collecting mostly negative opinions, on the sites of spectators Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, collecting more mixed reviews in the Anglo-Saxon press, it does not however deserve its purgatory. If it does not reach the narrative perfection and the dramatic crescendo of Seventhis tense thriller, carried by the alchemy of the duo-duel Hopkins-Farrell, is worth rediscovering.
