FATHER KNOWS BEST...Let me cut to the chase. This film did not, at all, meet my expectations. The trailers lead one to believe that it is a film with supernatural overtones, but it turns out to be something else all together. The story line seems simple on its face. Alison Callaway (Amy Irving), a wife and loving mother, unexpectedly decides to slit her wrist in the bathtub one night, killing herself. Her husband, psychologist David Callaway, comes upon her lifeless body, and so does their beloved daughter, Emily (Dakota Fanning). Emily goes into shock and comes under the care of a therapist named Katherine (Famke Janssen).
Sometime later, when Emily's condition seemingly improves, her father then decides to leave New York City, where they live, and relocate to a small upstate town. No sooner do they move there, they meet the real estate agent and the town's sheriff, both of whom seem a tad peculiar. Moreover, there appears to be something not quite right with the couple next door, especially...
Let's play Hide and Seek with the DVD, and pretend we can't find itIt's important for a director to immediately establish a level of trust with his/her audience. We need to believe that we are in capable hands that will introduce us to characters and situations that make perfect sense, and that events will follow one another with unyielding logic.
At first, I felt that a decision made early in the film was a decision that was outside the "trust" I described above. Toward the end of the film, I realized that the decision was OK - even though I thought it was a bad idea on the filmmaker's part to make that particular decision. I wish that the screenwriters had worked harder to come up with a different way to get from point A to point B. The problem with the "real" decision was that I lost faith in the director/story almost immediately because it appeared - at the time - to be utterly ridiculous.
There was a scene where a cat came jumping out of a closet for shock value, and my lord, I can't count the number of times where that...
Traumatically badThis movie starts off with the death of Emily's (Dakota Fanning) mother. Wanting to get away from it all, she and her father (De Niro), move to the country. There she finds friendship in an imaginary friend she calls Charlie. Strange, creepy things start happening, writing on walls, people dying, dolls defaced, etc...
The movie pretends to play out on the psychological effect of grief, which here came from the death of the mother. I don't want to spoil the movie, so I'll just say that one form we see comes in the shape of Emily's reclusiveness.
But unfortunately, it's just that, it pretends...there's no REAL psychological depth to the movie, which is too bad, otherwise it wouldn't have been that bad.
The movie plays out fairly predictably, in the sense that you can tell who is going to die and who isn't. Now I know this is supposed to be scary or something along those lines, but I just thought it failed at that. I was bored out of my mind during the first...
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