Chabert Watch! The Lost (2009)

Watched:  04/11/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Bryan Goeres

Here's my theory:  the writers came up with the ending for The Lost (2009), and then had to work backward from there.  Desperate to keep anyone from guessing the ending, they kinda screwed up what you need to do with a mystery, which is leave clues that make you realize "oh, yeah, it was kinda there all along!"  But, nope.  They hid it so well, and the twist is so out of left field, you're just sort of left shrugging.

Not that anyone was invested in the prior 85 or so minutes of the movie before the twist ending.  

This is an oddly misogynistic supernatural thriller/ psychological mystery wherein Lacey Chabert plays a young woman in a Spanish insane asylum.  Three years prior, she seems to have set a mansion on fire as well as someone inside.  As a student, she was living in the guest house.  She looks pale and spooky as she watches it all burn, and maybe has psychic powers.

The movie is kind of badly shot.  The audio is poorly mixed, and not helped by Assante mumbling his way through the dialog so badly we turned on subtitles.  Also, a good portion of the cast is Spanish and not hitting every line in a way you can hear.  So when Dina Meyer shows up enunciating, it's a trip.  

Armand Assante, who I've only ever seen in Judge Dredd, plays a psychiatrist who examined Chabert briefly 3 years ago before saying "she's nuts" and leaving her in the Spanish psych ward.  Why she did not come back stateside, I am unsure.  Chabert's sister is Dina Meyer, who basically blackmails Assante into going to take a look at Chabert again.

Credit to Chabert, who was willing to look like she hasn't had a shower in a week for the duration of the film.  She's showing signs of multiple personalities.  She's drawing spirals.  It's all very 1990's psychological thriller stuff which wasn't great in the late 1990's, old hat by 2009, and has aged like fine buttermilk.  In order for these movies to work, they have to make-up a version of multiple personality disorder, describe it badly, and generally mistreat the patients in grungy, sweaty hospitals.  

Anyway - eventually Assante figures out that maybe those personalities - all done by Chabert by doing various accents and trying on different roles (and colored contacts) - are maybe real people who disappeared.  Ie:  Chabert is haunted.  And likely those girls were all murdered.

By the way, the world's worst psychic is implemented along the way.

Basically, 70% of this movie is Assante metaphorically running up driveways looking for an answer, and then backing out, not sure what's going on.  The movie hints deeply at a solution that makes perfect sense if we can just find out what the swirl is that Chabert is drawing, and why one particular spirit just flips the fuck out every time.  

SPOILERS

But, oh ho ho!  You thought you cracked the case because you followed the clues and were waiting for the prestige moment when Assante pulls it all together, which he sorta does.  

Turns out, he killed all those girls!  And he killed his own wife!  But he didn't remember!  Because he's a forgetful fellow, I guess.  All those other clues?  The fire?  The girl freaking out?  Unrelated!

So, how did the ghosts get attached to Chabert?  Who knows!?  Why did she light that fire?  No one knows.  She just did, fam.  All the investigation of two pretty good suspects was all him being a silly goose who doesn't know what he did.  Because cinema!

Is it stupid?

Verily, it is stupid.

If there was a good idea, it needed to be thrown back in the rock tumbler of ideas because it is not smoothed down nor shiny yet.  It's a mess of well-worn concepts, tossing magic around like it's no big deal - and, really, Chabert's character would be a career-maker for somebody, so you'd think that would be of interest to someone.  She is manifesting scars that the dead girls had and whatnot.  Yet only Assante is interested.

This is maybe the most I've ever seen asked of Chabert in a movie, and to her credit, she tries.  She does create unique characters with unique voices, while still maybe not sticking any accent in particular as she rotates through accents.  As, as I said, she manages to look pretty rough through the whole film.  She is acting!

But it is really hard to forgive the fact that the fire goes nowhere, and there really are no hints that Assante was the perpetrator.  It was unclear to me he'd ever been in the area, or even why he was the one who interviewed Chabert, as it's sold as a relatively small town.

Also, the movie wants to suggest that Dina Meyer goes for Assante, and ain't no one believing that.  One, she's otherwise occupied and, two, because he looks like her dad's drunk friend.  Dina Meyer is not bad in this, and I hope she enjoyed her time in Spain.  

Also also, the movie is unconcerned with Chabert's fate in any way.  She's just *fine* after years of heavy medication and electroshock.  She's reading Let's Go Rome or some shit and given no lines at the end of the movie.  I want to know what she's doing and thinking.  Is she still magic?  What happened?

This movie is a curious point in Chabert's career.  After Mean Girls, she only sporadically landed big feature work, but was doing a ton of animation voice work (which she still does), and started in TV movies, including The Brooke Ellison Story, directed by Christopher Reeve.  She's alternating between horny teen comedies of the 00's and wholesome TV work and voicing Bratz dolls in cartoons.  

This same year, 2009, she'd appear in the The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past with Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner.  In 2010, though, she'd appear in Elevator Girl, which aired on the Hallmark Channel and effectively started her career with the network.  But she would be a part of a mix of low-budget thrillers for cable or DVD for some time.  

Anyway, it's kind of wild to see these arcs in her career as it was not a given she'd somehow wind up as the face of Hallmark and Christmas.  There's a lot of weird twists and turns and it's kind of fascinating to see how she's pivoted.  That said - a lot of those low-budget indie movies she did seem to have kind of vanished.  They aren't streaming, and so it's unlikely I'll see them during ChabertQuest 2025.  

But The Lost, I have now seen.  Part of what I'm considering a collection of Chabert films, all of which include the word "Lost" in the title.  Which means I'll be watching The Lost Tree and Lost in Space soon.