Fleeing her ex-husband, a mother with her young son move to a secluded house where a dark and sinister force resides.
Mysterious and eventually dramatic, yet doesn’t manage to hit the spot. Putting it on, knowing nothing about it, I felt quite neutral at first. Even though the narrative is quite restricted, the audience knows less than Laura and Cody and, therefore, is trying to catch up on cues such as Cody’s recurrent nightmare and the constantly ringing phone. The first plot point (the bridge between the first and the second act), arguably, builds up the suspense and increases the tension… only to calm down again immediately after. If you decide to watch it, you might find the pace and rhythm fluctuating “irregularly”.
I remember Christina Ricci when she was as young as Cody in The Adams Family (1991), and, in a way, I grew up watching her grow up in her films. She’s a tremendously talented actress who has played diverse and perplexing roles and deserves every praise under the sun. For reasons that only she and Hollywood are aware of, though, she started choosing films that didn’t have much to offer to the genre they belonged to. Having said that, admittedly, there are a couple of films she’s been in and I would like to watch.
After everything is said and done, looking back to Carol Chrest’s script and Chris Sivertson’s directing, one can say with certainty that the drama overcomes the horror in the end, and you can tell because of how heavy your heart feels. I know how mine felt, and that was mostly due to Ricci. As mentioned above, she is a remarkable actress who always meets her standards.
The little references to her mental health might help you watch it in a positive light. Furthermore, the party sequence got me a bit, as did her attempts to keep it together. There are some intense moments there, but as I have repeatedly said, the sum should always be greater than its parts.
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