Grade: C+

Verdict: A disturbing trip through the doors of perception that quickly runs out of gas.

By BOB TOWNSEND
Cox News Service

Recalling "Silence of the Lambs" and "Seven," "Suspect Zero" is a strangely compelling but ultimately failed serial-killer thriller.

Directed by E. Elias Merhige -- the indie filmmaker who surfaced in Hollywood in 2000 with the critically acclaimed "Shadow of the Vampire" -- "Suspect Zero" has an edgy sensibility and skewed visual style that promise a lot. But it never builds characters to care about or a story that gets much better than its tricky, paranormal premise.

Using a scientific kind of directed clairvoyance that allows him to perceive a "target" far removed in space or time, "remote viewer" Ben Kingsley plays a creepy killer with the telepathic ability to get into the minds of his victims.

In the terrifying opening scene, he emerges from a thunderstorm to stalk a traveling salesman, who he taunts with some shocking drawings then deposits dead on the GPS coordinates of the Arizona-New Mexico state line.

Kingsley is a gaunt, haunted man who may or may not be a former FBI agent. But his obsessive plan is to draw Aaron Eckhart ("The Missing"), a moody FBI agent with major demons of his own, into his nightmare web -- woven from an interstate map, dotted with push-pins that point to the locations of missing and abducted children, and a menacing 18-wheeler rolling across the country.

Eckhart, who's been exiled to the "minors" in the Albuquerque bureau after going crazy and botching a case in Dallas, has terrible headaches and, like Kingsley, "knows" things, too. He also has an ex-lover and former partner, Carrie-Ann Moss, who shows up to help Eckhart work the salesman murder (but acts more like she'd rather be back in "The Matrix").

What Eckhart and Moss end up trying to figure out is not so much who done it but why. Kingsley's riveting, maniacal performance makes "Suspect Zero" more watchable than many similar movies.