Saturday 5 June 2010

The Uninvited (2009) – aka, ‘The Hand that rocks the Cradle’… with ghosts!

A girl is at a party on the beach. Her boyfriend pushes her to have sex with him, so she leaves the party and runs home through the woods.  She comes across MV5BOTY0OTc3OTkyNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTg4Nzc5MQ@@__V1__CR0,0,426,426_SS100_three garbage bags filled with something unknown.  One of the bags moves.  She goes to the bag and bends to open it.  A body ,which is a tangle of disjointed limbs, bursts from the bag and the head twists round to face her. ‘Don’t go home’, it says.  But the girls does go home and she finds her sick mother in bed in family’s boat house.  She runs up to the main house, but as she runs the boat house bursts into flames.

Fast forward eight months and the girl, Anna, is recounting this ‘dream’ to a psychiatrist.  She is about to leave a mental hospital where she has been since she slit her wrists after her mother’s death.  Anna goes home to her older sister, Alex, and her nonchalant father.  Living with her father is the woman who nursed her mother, Rachel. 

As soon as Anna gets home she is plagued by ‘bad dreams’ and eventually decides the ghost of her mother is trying to tell her something.  Anna and Alex MV5BMTkyNTM1MTU3Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDg3MDYyMg@@__V1__CR120,0,485,485_SS100_ become convinced that Rachel is not who she says she is and in fact murdered their mother so she could have their father for herself.  So starts a series of ‘ghosts’ and visions leading Anna to the truth about what happened the night her mother died.

The Uninvited is a remake of a South Korean movie and it does have the same feel about it as some of the great Japanese remakes, such as The Grudge, and The Ring.  The main similarity it has to those movies is the way the ‘ghosts’ move – in that same jerky, back-to-front, way.  The ghosts are scary and I would have liked to have seen more of them, but there were some really jumpy moments right from the very start.  I felt sorry for Anna as her father just seems to not give a shit about his daughter, who has just come out of a mental hospital and obviously has some stuff to deal with (huge underestimate!).  The girlfriend, Rachel, treats the girls even worse than their father does and you can’t blame them for thinking she killed their mother.

There were some strange decisions made by some of the characters and whilst watching I was thinking that they were seriously letting down what could have otherwise been a decent movie.  However, I had to totally eat my words when the movie ended with one hell of a twist I just did not see coming (and I normally pride myself on spotting these things).

Though it had some rocky parts in the middle the ending definitely makes up for that.  It’s a decent remake and worth a watch.

7/10.

3 comments:

  1. Sometimes the ending can save a movie. I've stayed away from this movie but now I may rent it. Thanks, Roland

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  2. Very true! After all, where would movies like 'The Sixth Sense' be without the ending? Thanks for stopping by Roland!

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  3. Watched it last night before seeing your review. Good movie and didn´t guess the end.

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