For some reason I recorded this and it sat on my DVR queue for six months, but I finally got around to watching it two days before Halloween, in the hopes that it met my need for a good scary movie. A lot of today's horror films are little more than murder porn. The Saw series is the best example of this trend, and the Hostel movies are similar. The film starts with a discussion of Lee's pathological fear of space. This is a great device to be the center of the film. We're given some background as to how and when it started - it seems to have started when a boy next door died as a child. One suspects suppressed memories. So, she's alone in the house, and some kind of ghostly things start happening. She hears noises, has nightmares, coins start spinning themselves, the TV goes off an on for no reason, etc. We wonder if this is a ghost story or a psychological study a la Vertigo.
Sadly, the filmmakers have decided to cross Vertigo with some kind of Rosemary's Baby story that seems to entail the sacrifice of a baby. Also, the story is confused because some of Lee's visions are her own personal demons while others are the spirits of the house. And then there are some demonic forces involved. On the whole, there's a lot of promise in this film but it sadly gets wasted by an incoherent plot. I wish the first half of the movie had led to a better second half. That could have been a pretty good film. It certainly would have simplified matters if the filmmakers had stuck to a story that dealt solely with Lee's phobia. Whatever they were trying to do didn't work.
Sadly, the filmmakers have decided to cross Vertigo with some kind of Rosemary's Baby story that seems to entail the sacrifice of a baby. Also, the story is confused because some of Lee's visions are her own personal demons while others are the spirits of the house. And then there are some demonic forces involved. On the whole, there's a lot of promise in this film but it sadly gets wasted by an incoherent plot. I wish the first half of the movie had led to a better second half. That could have been a pretty good film. It certainly would have simplified matters if the filmmakers had stuck to a story that dealt solely with Lee's phobia. Whatever they were trying to do didn't work.