Note—-Not to be confused with the 2007 movie The Premonition starring Sandra Bullock or a 1972 movie of the same title written and directed by Alan Rudolph
The small-town Deep South, the mid-’70’s. A beautiful young woman gets off a bus near a traveling carnival. A man from the carnival, dressed as a mime/clown, clearly glad to see her. The woman glad to see him, but she’s got other things on her mind. “Have you seen her?” she asks him right away. She asks to borrow his SUV; he says yes.
The Premonition is a movie about people searching for love, but few of them able to find it. You watch them and learn; most of them are too fragile, too damaged to give love, despite how much they want to. They dream of a love that can save them. Maybe it can but it is out of reach.
The mime, Jude, believes he loves this mysterious woman Andrea. They knew each other in an institution/mental hospital; both are released now. Andrea is obsessed with starting life again with her daughter Janie, who was taken from her and given for adoption. After she borrows Jude’s SUV her first drive is to Janie’s school to see if her daughter remembers her.
You may recall an obscure Stones song, Out of Time.
“You don’t know what’s going on/
You’ve been away for far too long/
You can’t come back and think you are still there”
But the movie does show the other side of the coin: Janie’s adopted parents, Sheri and Miles. Sheri tends toward the hypersensitive but her love for Janie is strong.
Despite losing two previous babies in infancy, Sheri is able to love unwaveringly. Her husband—an academic— is preoccupied with his job and with other women. But he is clearly open to new ideas and willing to reach for new solutions to get his daughter back when things later turn desperate.
And Miles’ faculty colleague Dr. Kingsley has learned how to “think outside the box” in reference to psychic phenomena and how to apply it to unique situations; Andrea may be alive or dead but either way her obsession with Janie threatens the little girl’s life.
Jude the mime may be the saddest character. Hopelessly In love with Andrea but just able to see how fragile is her grasp on reality. The two of them go to Janie’s house to kidnap her. But Andrea grabs Janie’s doll, lying right next to Janie. Andrea continues talking to the doll as if she were a real girl; Something has changed this woman in her hospital commitment; something has been cut out of her.
You may recall Wesley in I Walked with a Zombie. Drunk every day, in love with Jessica, who has lost her mind, most likely her soul, to the high fever that almost killed her. Jude has a good heart but nearly no capacity to love; watch the scene where he tries to reach out to Janie.
Richard Lynch (God Told me to, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Scarecrow) was a much under-rated actor, limited mostly to blackhearted villain or psycho roles. Jude is much more complex and Lynch makes the most of his part. This is a quiet subtle movie without much melodrama and violence. See it anyway.