I discovered the fledgling talents of actress Emily Browning when I reviewed “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events” last year. Since her appearance as a teenager in that film, Browning has blossomed into a strikingly beautiful young actress with hordes of talent and promise. Browning takes the staring role in the 2009 horror film “The Uninvited.”
One flaw horror movies often employ is the filmmakers attempt to manufacture genuine scares causing the written story and plot to be overlooked. Great horror classics like “The Shining” or more recently “The Woman in Black” are prefect examples of truly terrifying tales that include not only spine chilling moments but well written and thoroughly developed plots.
A potential drawback can occur when an otherwise scary tale becomes devoid of frights at the hands of the plot itself, and such is the case with “The Uninvited.” A remake of a 2003 South Korean film called “A Tale of Two Sisters,” “The Uninvited” opens as a potentially chilling ghost story but midway through does a complete 180 and becomes more of a murder mystery.
A house fire claimed the life of a family matriarch, and after ten months of therapy, youngest daughter Anna (Browning) is set to return home. Anna has been suffering from a series of all too real nightmares and hallucinations since the fire, and as she leaves the care and safety of the hospital, her doctor advised that the only way to be rid of the visions she is having is to finish what she started.
As Anna returns to her families beautiful coastal estate, her frightening visions continue as she attempts to adjust to her non-patient life. Her father (David Strathairn) is a successful writer and has since entered into a relationship with his late wife’s much younger nurse (Elizabeth Banks) the quintessential gold digging vixen.
Anna’s seemingly only ally is her older sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel) who welcomes Anna back with a comical “welcome to your new ward. Better food, creepier people.”
“The Uninvited” contains some very scary scenes at the start, and through the first act appeared to be on pace for the makings of a great thriller with solid acting, a perfect atmosphere, and terrifying moments as Anna has visions of her dead mother and other assortments of fright.
Where it begins to founder is when the horror movie morphs into a murder mystery. As Anna and Alex attempt to discover what happened to their mother, all the tension dries up and you’ll find yourself asking; what happened to the ghosts?
And then, the final fifteen minutes happen.
What starts as a solid horror piece, then movies into a whodunit mystery, and closes out with a head scratching ripoff of an infamous late 90s movie by Mr. Shayamalon (I’ll leave it at that). The movie squanders the great acting talents of Browning, Banks, Kebbel, and Strathairn who together formed a great bond and could have carried the film on its own had it stayed true to its horror opening.
Browning and Kebbel are a perfect pair, beautiful and exciting to watch on screen together, and perfectly paired for the role of the sisters. Strathairn is solid as he always is, possessing all the intangibles of a great actor and Elizabeth Banks, known for more comical roles, shows her versatility as a serious actress.
Like a football team that dominates for three and a half quarters before throwing the game away at the end, “The Uninvited” fumbles away being a good film and closes out as a complete loser.
by – Matt Christopher
