Excellent on the surface, lacking underneath

Rating: 6/10 (11 August 2009)

A good film - very good looking and excellently acted.
The downfall seems to be the lack of real cohesion in the story - not so much that it doesn't make sense, but that there is a lot of points made to have an affect that is not really achieved.
A couple adopt a child from an orphanage. She is lovely. She turns out to be a somewhat troubled youngster with psychopathic tendencies. The family is divided - the mother can see the problem, the father believes in the adoptee. Isolation, paranoia, etc, etc
But this story is embellished by back story that is blurted out here and there. The mother has a history of a drink problem - can she be trusted? Yes. She is an extraordinarily competent person and the two points where drink is an issue seem to be jemmied in rather unconvincingly.
The husband has roving eyes - again rather obviously illustrated with engineered dialogue and a scene where a woman makes a pass at him. But neither of them exhibit any real problems. He seems to be a most loving and attentive husband, and her an extraordinarily composed wife.
The mother-in-law hovers around, presumably keeping an eye on the troubled woman - another illustration of how the wife can not be trusted. Yet she only is given one point to make her presence felt in that capacity and then wanders around like a ghost for the rest of the film neither saying anything nor taking power from the wife.
Then we have the police turning up at a crucial time - twice - where they are so obviously waiting in the wings for the resolution before stepping on to the set, that it is annoying.
I'll highlight this as a possible spoiler, though I shall be circumspect. There is a twist to the film which is almost entirely pointless - the only possible reason for it is that it makes it OK to give a child a good pasting on the cinema screen.
The film is very good quality, just fundamentally lacking. There are many ideas that seem to have been sketched out when they were writing the story that should either have been fully included or totally excluded.
They are not to the forefront enough to create the atmosphere that they presumably intend or subtle enough not to intrude rather than contribute.
Worth a watch, but not a re-watch.