The shiniest, most beautiful looking nothing-burger you’ve ever seen. Magnificent sets, meticulous lighting, gorgeous cinematography, and yet: the narrative is bafflingly boring. Tom Cruise’s magnetism and smoldering love affair with the camera holds this film up, but the intrigue, peculiarity, lust, and sinister atmosphere the movie tries to cultivate fizzles out into ambiguous mystery and half-baked storylines. The principle themes – threat and passion – were not fleshed out enough in the characters to feel immediate or interesting: in order to be engaging, there has to be an emotional tie or intellectual connection, not just surface-level reflecting pools on the the subjects of taboo, infidelity, and desire. If this movie pushed a little further, pounced into action, and really owned what it’s hinting at or trying to expose – dared to dwell on the emotions it attempts to lure out of the viewer, instead of darting away – it could have been a stunning film. Instead, you go upscale window shopping for cults in turn of the century NYC during Christmastime.