Uninvited an Invitation to Tedium
Ten months after the fiery death of her invalid mother, Anna (Emily Browning) has returned home from her time away in a mental institution to discover her father Steven (David Strathairn) is on the verge of marrying the family’s former nurse Rachael (Elizabeth Banks). Soon she’s seeing disturbing visions of murdered children and of her Mom’s charred body, all of them trying to warn the girl of some ephemeral sort of impending doom.
Elizabeth Banks and Emily Browning in DreamWorks' The Uninvited
Confiding in her older sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel), the two decide to look into their former employee’s – and soon to be mother-in-law's – sordid past. What they find, however, puts their whole family in jeopardy, the truth even more devastatingly horrible and tragic than anything Anna could ever have remotely imagined.
Based on the Korean horror film A Tale of Two Sisters, the suspense-thriller The Uninvited is a surprisingly stylish and relatively well acted little picture that proved to be far more interesting than I’d originally anticipated. British directorial siblings The Guard Brothers do a decent job of filling the frame with intriguing curiosities, the ebb and flow of their film at times as soft and as seductive as oceanic tides crashing delicately against a sandy shore.
As nice as this is, there is a rather major problem. The film just isn’t scary, pretty much not ever. More than that, it engages in a bit of silly Shyamalan-like slight of hand that’s totally idiotic, the final ten minutes making the previous 70 about as pointless as eating five dozen caramel apples with a mouth full of rotting teeth. This is one of those movies where you’re impressed with the craftsmanship and production values yet completely uninspired by everything else, the whole thing falling so flat a plate-glass window would probably be envious of its see-through transparency.
The main problem is that we’ve seen all this before. Both The Ring and The Grudge covered much of this ground with far more unsettling dexterity, while The Sixth Sense and The Others offered up ghoulish finales that actually made sense when the film as a whole is rewound and taken in complete context. There is a serious case of déjà vu one gets while sitting in the theater watching it, and by the time it was over I almost had trouble recalling anything of interest that actually took place.
That’s a little unfair. Browning is fairly convincing as the mentally unraveling Anna, while Banks had moments of menace that at least came sort of close to putting me on edge. Christopher Young (Untraceable) offers up another one of his reliably spooky scores, while music video cinematographer Dan Landin makes a wonderful transition to features, his slinky camerawork creating an uncomfortable vibe that keeps a person watching long after they’ve already stopped caring about anything character-wise that's going on.
There’s not really too much else to say. The Uninvited looks good, moves well and has some solid performances yet is ultimately undone by a hackneyed, over-familiar script that brings new meaning to the word cliché. It just isn’t worth the effort, not to talk about, to write about and certainly not to see. Going to the theater is nothing less than an invitation to tedium, and there's not even the ghost of a chance I’d take the time to sit through the darn thing again.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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