The Uninvited

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Rating 2¾


Directed by the Guard Brothers (Charles Guard and Thomas Guard)

Written by Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, based on the film ‘Janghwa, Hongryeon’ written by Ji-woon Kim

Starring Emily Browning (Anna Rydell), Arielle Kebbel (Alex Rydell), Elizabeth Banks (Rachel Somers), David Strathairn (Steven Rydell), Maya Massar (Lillian Rydell), Jesse Moss (Matt), Dean Paul Gibson (Dr Siberling), Heather Doerksen (Mildred Kemp), Lex Burnham (Iris Wright) and Kevin McNulty (Sheriff Emery)


Anna Rydell has been confined in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from a psychological breakdown, since the death of her mother Lillian in an explosion ten months earlier. Her mother had been suffering from a serious illness that left her bed-ridden. She is told by her psychiatrist that her treatment has been taken as far as it can go and she can now return home. She is collected by her novelist father, Steven, and driven back to the idyllic family home, set on a hill above the coastline. Ecstatic to be reunited with her older sister Alex, she is much less happy to see Rachel Somers, who had been her mother’s nurse, but is now living with her father. Anna and Alex are convinced that Rachel was responsible for their mother’s death and now intends to get rid of them as well. Anna also has dreams about a young girl and starts to have hallucinations, in which she believes the child is trying to tell her something about Rachel’s past.

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‘The Uninvited’ is a 2009 psychological horror film from DreamWorks, the American film studio founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. Based on the acclaimed 2003 South Korean film ‘Janghwa, Hongryeon’ (A Tale of Two Sisters), the rights were bought by the English directing team the Guard Brothers (Charles and Thomas), who had been part of the Footlights dramatic society when studying at Cambridge and were previously best known for directing television and film commercials.

This is a horror film in the style of ‘What Lies Beneath’ and ‘Hide and Seek’ and is not specifically targeted at the usual teenage horror film market. The cast includes the respected veteran character actor David Strathairn, who was Academy Award-nominated for his lead role in the 2005 George Clooney-directed ‘Good Night and Good Luck’. Elizabeth Banks has established a very successful film career over the last ten years and I have been impressed by Arielle Kebbel in various films, irrespective of the quality of those films. She is a likeable actress with some genuine degree of screen presence. I had previously seen the elfin 20-year-old Australian actress Emily Browning as a young teenager in the films ‘Ghost Ship’ and ‘Darkness Falls’.

I do like psychological thrillers of this type and this is a reasonably good one, although not without its flaws. The Elizabeth Banks character is intended to be ambiguous. Is she a gold digger? Is she the archetypical evil step-mother? If she is either of these things, does that necessarily mean that she is a killer? Did she really cause the explosion that killed Lillian Rydell? This is tried and tested territory, but I could not help but think that Rachel quickly becomes far too two-dimensional. She is a one-note character and the ambiguity is soon lost. To a degree this plays to the advantage of the inevitable twist in the story, but it still feels somewhat heavy-handed. Banks has stated that she based her performance on that of Rebecca De Mornay in the 1992 film ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle’. This is fine, but Peyton Flanders, the character played by De Mornay in that film, is clearly unhinged, whereas we are supposed to be uncertain about Rachel.

These criticisms aside, I did enjoy the film, although perhaps more for the cast than for its overall quality. The film does have the obviously glossy look of top quality production values, but it is quite formulaic and there is certainly no new ground broken here, although it moves along at a nice pace. It rather put me in mind of the direct-to-DVD 2006 film ‘Ring Around the Rosie’, which itself was clearly influenced by Japanese and South Korean horror films.

‘The Uninvited’ has a 31% rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes from 131 reviews. Irrespective of whether or not the generally negative reviews are warranted, there is no doubt that it suffers by being compared to the highly praised South Korean original, which has an 87% fresh rating from 52 reviews. The American remake performed with mediocre (although not desperately poor) results at the box office and has a worldwide gross a little under $38 million.

Review posted 17 July 2009



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Darkness Falls

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Rating 3


Directed by Jonathan Liebesman

Written by Joe Harris, John Fasano and James Vanderbilt

Starring Emma Caulfield, Chaney Kley, Lee Cormie, Grant Piro, Sullivan Stapleton, Steve Mouzakis, Peter Curtin, Joshua Anderson and Emily Browning


It would be very easy to find all kinds of faults with this film and that is precisely what the critics did. 120 reviews collected at Rotten Tomatoes result in a horrible 8% rating.

“The tagline reads, ‘Evil Rises, Darkness Falls,’ but they clearly forgot the third caveat: ‘Slumber Ensues’.”
Matt Brunson, Creative Loafing

It’s not original. It isn’t scary. It follows tried and tested patterns already well established for modern day “popcorn” teen horror films – although it began life as a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It could be easily argued there is no reason for this film to exist, but that presumably goes for any film that is not deemed to be a classic of paramount artistic merit. Who is to judge what films belong in this category? I have no time at all for any of the ‘Star Wars’ films (not that I’ve actually seen all of them), but the original one, in particular, is widely acknowledged as a classic. I can’t understand why, but that is of no great consequence. These things are subjective. Each time I’ve watched ‘Darkness Falls’ I’ve enjoyed it more. It’s the kind of horror film I like.

I guess it’s true to say that modern “chillers”, horror films that seek to be creepy rather than gore-fests, are failing in their intent when compared to the old classics like ‘The Spiral Staircase’, ‘The Haunting’ and ‘Village Of The Damned’. This might go some way towards explaining the brief fascination with so-called “J-Horror”, a genre that harks back to an older era. Part of the success of those older films and many others like them is the black and white photography, which lends them an immediately eerie feel.

‘Darkness Falls’ might not be the best film in the world, but I think it works rather well. Emma Caulfield is a strangely undervalued and underused actress, although I suppose that could be said of many other actresses – and, indeed, actors – in Hollywood. The first time I watched the film I wasn’t especially impressed by Chaney Kley, but each time I’ve watched it again since then I have become more taken by his nervy, jittery performance. It suits the role and his character’s backstory very well. It’s sad that he had died so young – just 34 years old.

The film, which wasn’t exactly a budget-breaker, grossed $47.5 million at the box office.



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Ghost Ship

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Rating 3½


Directed by Steve Beck

Written by Mark Hanlon and John Pogue

Starring Gabriel Byrne, Desmond Harrington, Julianna Margulies, Isaiah Washington, Ron Eldard, Alex Dimitriades, Karl Urban, Francesca Rettondini and Emily Browning


Here comes another film that the critics and, it would seem, the majority of the online horror film fan community hate.

It seems to be the fate of most horror films to receive a critical booting from both professional film critics and the audience they are intended to appeal to. This is particularly true of those films given a PG13 rating (the ones Eli Roth dismissively said were made for “teenage girls”), but ‘Ghost Ship’ had an R rating in America and an 18 certificate in the UK. I’m not sure what warranted this rating, but we do get a fleeting glimpse of a bare breast. Such is the strange world we live in that a bare breast is deemed to have more potential to damage young minds than a hundred brutal and gory killings.

Roger Ebert wrote that the film is, “Better than you expect but not as good as you hope,” which is a reasonable assessment. It’s a bog-standard haunted house story, with all the expected clichés, except that it takes place on a ship. The characters, the misfit crew of a salvage tug, conform to the tried and tested stereotype previously established in films like ‘Alien’, ‘The Thing’ and ‘The Abyss’. Gabriel Byrne, playing an old salty been-there-seen-that seadog, heads up a cast that also includes Desmond Harrington (‘Wrong Turn’). It might not be very original, but it is fun and the 90 minutes running time passes by painlessly. The characters are likeable, or, at least, they are not dislikeable.

The film’s storyline was inspired by the true story of an Italian luxury liner called the SS Andrea Doria, which sank off the coast of Massachusetts in 1956 following a collision with another ship.



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