Film

The screenwriters of Knowing toss around paranormal-thriller clichés with such gleeful abandon that you almost have to smile: Strangers stand menacingly still, watching our heroes from afar; pale, eerily impassive little girls pop up as though on loan from The Shining; and we even get a visit to that old standby, the “crazy room,” where an obsessive person has covered the walls with annotated newspaper clippings. And damned if Proyas doesn’t keep it breezily enjoyable for the first two thirds, even as he’s unleashing mayhem like an airline crash (complete with burning people running at the camera) and a subway disaster.

At the opening of a school’s time capsule sealed 50 years earlier, quiet kid Caleb (Canterbury) opens a letter full of strange numbers. His father (Cage), a brilliant astronomer who lectures on causality and randomness (What astronomy course is that covered in again?) notices that the numbers seem to chronicle a half-century’s worth of large-scale disasters, complete with a death toll for each. And the last few entries are for dates coming up fast. Uh-oh.

The challenge of many paranormal movies comes when you have to explain what all the spooky foreboding has actually been about. Suffice it to say that the last third is a mélange of Close Encounters and Christian eschatology, and you’ll wish the film had stopped about 15 minutes sooner.