Less than half good

Rating: 4/10 (2 May 2011)

The first half is great. If I were rating this on the first half alone it would score an 8 or 9. But then, well...
Haunted house movies are overburdened with clichés these days and this one is no different. Yet, the way in which the atmosphere is generated from the outset is extremely skilled and considered. The camera angles, the build-up, the inspired use of music and sound, all combine to create a successfully creepy and nervy ambiance. The scene where the wife sees through the window a short figure in black dancing to "Tiptoe Through The Tulips" gives the nape of the neck a good tingling for a moment. The triggers within the script are cued immaculately, timed just right for the right unnerving effect. It kicks off and sustains an unswervingly solid creativity for the first fifty-percent of it's running time.
Everything is cleverly crafted until this critical midpoint, wherein a decision must be made about the reveal, the moment for exposition when the audience begins to take delivery of what is going on and why. The makers opt for the most campy, hokey, misguided direction to take and the whole construct catastrophically falls apart.
The introduction of the two Ghostbusters rejects, paranormal comedy nerds, is utterly jarring. They have lots of homemade electronic spirit-detecting paraphernalia to talk about and a standard slacker animosity for each other. Then the little old psychic lady, a physically normalised version of the eccentric short-stop from Poltergeist, steps in and dons a gas mask for a séance. She rattles off lots of mind-stupefying mumbo-jumbo about the afterlife and out of body experiences that absolutely ravages the fabric of credibility that the film has established. Next we're off to the astral plane, the realm of the dead, and it's really very badly realised - a sort of emptier, darker version of the real world with grinning, painted mannequins and lots of Alice Cooper eye makeup. The downhill plunge all the way to the "oh, like I didn't see that coming - yawn" shock ending is astonishingly abrupt and irreversible.
What starts as a genuinely disturbing paranormal chiller suddenly and sharply devolves into a banal, low-rent version of The Cell or Dreamscape, and my interest almost completely evaporated. It's such a shame that the trajectory of the premise didn't continue and deliver the expected payload in the second half. Seldom have I seen a film go from near genius to total bilge so completely, utterly and irredeemably. It's a real shame.
The lesson is, when it's time to reveal what's been going on, these filmmakers should really try a lot harder in future to make what comes next as good as, if not better than, what has gone before. The foundation was there, but the roof caved in and wrecked it.