BEFORE: This film will wrap things up for October and horror films....for now. They'll be back next year, rising from the grave like a zombie... in fact, I'll have three films about zombies, nine films about mummies, and then the rest of what remains on the horror list, like rats, swamp monsters, things from outer space, and one-offs like the Babadook, plus whatever Stephen King films I haven't covered, like "The Dark Tower", "Children of the Corn" and "Gerald's Game". I promise it will be mostly random.
Tonight I've got to rely on another indirect link to get me back on track, to connect with my last chain of 15 films for 2018 - Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was in a film called "The Red Dress" with Renee Asherson (last seen in 1944's "Henry V"), who appears in "The Others". It's all downhill from here to the end of Year 10, 14 films to watch in 61 days, so I can skip a few days here and there, as long as I get where I need to be at Christmas time.
THE PLOT: A woman who lives in her darkened old family house with her two photosensitive children becomes convinced that the home is haunted.
AFTER: I'm going to try very hard to not give this one away, I try to be as anti-spoiler as possible, but it could be impossible to talk about this one without ruining it for anyone who hasn't seen it, so feel free to stop reading if you have NOT seen this film, or pause, go watch it and come right back, I'll wait here.
All good? Because I made the mistake of learning too much about this film before watching it, and then once you know something, you can't un-know it, so I was definitely at a disadvantage, not being able to watch this film without knowing that thing. I'm guessing that the film is better if you don't know the thing, or at least it could be more suspenseful, but if you do know the thing going in, then it becomes rather stupid. I'd say it's even pointless to watch this film if you know too much about it, so please try to avoid that.
If you can manage to go in cold, then it's the story of a woman living in a very large house in the Channel Islands, and she seems very protective, perhaps even over-protective, of her two children. Her husband is off fighting "the war", one would guess World War II but other answers seem possible. She hires three new servants, who are instructed to always keep the curtains closed, because the children are very sensitive to sunlight. And there are other rules, like the children are kept in locked rooms, and only one door can be unlocked at a time, so that there can only be one way in or out of a room.
One might suppose that the mother has gone mad, and in fact the children make some references to their mother acting oddly since the last servants left. With a husband off fighting a war, perhaps some allowances can be made for madness, especially if she does not know if her husband is still alive. Meanwhile, the children debate the concepts of religion that they've been taught, such as the "fact" that God created the world in 6 days, and the difference between limbo and purgatory. I support this part, because the kids seem like the smartest characters, and they don't really believe the B.S. about the afterlife, because really, how much sense does that make, in the end?
Then stranger things start happening around the house, the mother starts to hear voices, and the daughter claims to have seen other people in the house, so naturally the mother believes that the house might be haunted. The new servants, who were pretty creepy to begin with, start acting even creepier, and then - well, I feel like maybe I've said enough already, perhaps even too much.
Bottom line, this is mildly interesting because I don't think the thing has been done before, not like this anyway. But since I knew it going in, that colored everything and it couldn't get the story up to a level where it surprised me in any way.
Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Secret in Their Eyes"), Fionnula Flanagan (last heard in "A Christmas Carol"), Christopher Eccleston (last seen in "Legend"), Elaine Cassidy, Eric Sykes, Alakina Mann, James Bentley, Alexander Vince, Keith Allen (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Michelle Fairley (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea").
RATING: 4 out of 10 white sheets
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