Psychopath’s tale evokes dread, fear

There’s a retro quality to the horror thriller “The Lost” that serves it well, not only in mitigating its 2005 copyright but also in distinguishing it from the grislier pictures that have co-opted the genre.

That’s not to say this disturbing look at a magnetic young psychopath named Ray Pye (Marc Senter) doesn’t contain its gruesome moments, but it’s the film’s emotional brutality that ultimately makes it so frightening. Enhanced by Senter’s electrifying performance, the brash and bluntly amoral Ray is an enormously vivid movie monster, even if director-producer Chris Sivertson, who also adapted the script from Jack Ketchum’s novel, doesn’t much explore the method to Ray’s oily madness.

After a chilling prologue depicting Ray’s thrill-killing of two innocent women, the movie jumps ahead four years to find Ray managing his mother’s low-rent motel, dealing drugs and canoodling with the local hotties inexorably drawn to the hair-trigger pretty boy. Though the initial murders have gone curiously unsolved, dogged police detective Charlie Schilling (Michael Bowen) and his retired partner Ed (Ed Lauter), still certain Ray was responsible, start to engage him in an occasionally unconvincing game of cat and mouse.

Sivertson creates a tangible sense of dread throughout, though sharper editing in the film’s second half might have better sustained its first-hour tension. Nonetheless, “The Lost” succeeds as both a superior crime drama and a haunting cautionary tale.

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“The Lost.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 59 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500.