Screenwriter and director Pascal Laugier’s meekly compelling, recent thriller, The Tall Man (2012) unfolds in a predictable pattern that twists its way into meaning at the very end. The story begins in a destitute town, Coldwater, cast in an eerie grey hue, just to remind watchers something really is amiss, despite protagonist Julia’s (Jessica Biel) friendly stoicism as she makes her rounds as the town nurse and do-gooder.

*Spoiler Alert*

The Tall Man is quickly revealed as a local myth used to explain how young children keep disappearing, and though some claim to have caught glimpses of the mystery man, no one has been able to identify him. Inhabitants of the former mining-town are down on their luck since industry went bust and appear worn, uninspired and glum. One is left wondering if it’s because their children have disappeared, or if it's because they’re poor.

The initial story presented, that of Julia the pleasant, widowed mother who loses her child to The Tall Man a quarter way into the film, morphs into a different one--as promised by the foreboding music and lighting that set the tone from the beginning—Julia the demented, barren woman who’s taken to stealing children, and then killing them because she “couldn’t keep them all,” or so she says, with teary eyes to a woman whose child she captured.

Julia’s attachment to the latest boy in her captivity, the only one we see her with who’s introduced as her son, comes across as extreme for someone who has no relation to him, and though Julia demonstrates, at this point in the film, that she’s crazy, she recognizes he is not actually hers. Still, she dangles off the back of a moving van in to get him back and pulls herself out of a car accident with shards of glass in her face to keep after whomever it is stole ‘her’ boy.

It seems the story has run its course with Julia behind bars when she’s crying, talking about the numerous children she nabbed, and how she was just trying to save them from the harsh world of Coldwater. 

That’s where things get interesting, for a little while at least. Numerous children were taken, but they were siphoned into different lives, with new identities and new parents. Julia had been roping kids from impoverished families, and likely from dead-end, impoverished lives and giving them to wealthy parents who take them to lush parks for play dates and have the means to send them to private schools, and they’re young enough to accept this shift in their lives rather easily. This leaves the audience to contemplate not so much the obvious question of whether this is wrong--yes, stealing kids from loving families is clearly not morally correct--but the trickier question of why. 

While The Tall Man is thin on suspense, it at least has something to say, but by the time it gets around to saying it, you may not care. Most movie-goers will enjoy the small shocks and surprises it delivers in a familiar package, and just might have something to talk about after the film other than Jessica Biel.