The story, according to the website for the movie: "An unexplained blackout plunges the city of Detroit into total darkness, and by the time the sun rises, only a few people remain—surrounded by heaps of empty clothing, abandoned cars, and lengthening shadows. A small handful of strangers that have survived the night..." Now let's tear this movie to pieces. First of all, Vanishing on 7th Street is, disappointingly, not really about Detroit but about a global event that transforms humans into shades, ghosts, shadows on the wall. On top of that, in the film, the whole sun is dying. Each day sees less and less daylight. Darkness is becoming total. Yet this growing darkness, the death of the sun, affects only humans. Cats, horses, and plants seem to be doing just fine without the sun.

The only way humans can stay alive in this black, black world is to be within a circle of light. This is what keeps "the few" (Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, John Leguizamo, Jacob Latimore) together—light from candles, lighters, headlights, flashlights, glow sticks. But the minute you are in the dark, you vanish and leave behind a pile of clothes.

The movie makes no fucking sense! And it makes no effort to make any sense of itself. There is dark; there is light. If there is light, great; if there is no light, too bad. One character, played by Leguizamo, babbles on and on about something that happened to some dumb pilgrims hundreds of years ago: The pilgrims just vanished, just like the people in Detroit are now vanishing—these vanishings must be related. Another character (Newton) babbles on about Jesus, belief, the cross, and her baby being in heaven. Another (Christensen) is the hard-nosed atheist. But none of these approaches (mysticism, religion, pragmatism) comes close to the answer for the vanishings and shadows. Why? Because there is no answer. And here is the real wrong done by this film: It imagines evil as something that comes out of the blue. But evil is not pure. Evil is always social and locatable. There is no evil outside of the light of human society. recommended