Starts out good, but gets progressively worse

Rating: 6/10 (28 July 2009)

This movie had a lot of potential, but ultimately did not live up to my expectations. The cinematography was excellent, and the director did a wonderful job arranging the lighting, house, etc to give it just the right feel. Also, the start of the movie was very promising and good. It developed slowly and dramatically, and was based on actual suspense and not just cheap thrills. All of this changed, however, somewhere in between Esther throwing the girl from the slide and burning the tree house down. It's hard to pinpoint a definite time that the shift occurs, but rather it happens gradually in this time frame. By the time the tree house burns down, a lot of the suspense is missing and there are more cheap thrills and nonsense. By the time of the hospital scene (which I will discuss in a bit) all the way to the end, the movie gets increasingly ridiculous, over the top and cheap. By that point, all of the suspense is killed and the movie turns into a typical cheap horror film.
The hospital scene completely annoyed me. Both of my parents and two of my grandparents have worked in hospitals, so I've been in and out of them my whole life, and even the cheapest, rinky-dink hospitals have so many doors with key-coded locks that there is no way in hell that Esther could have gotten from the waiting room area into the son's room, especially if he were in an intensive care unit like he was. Also, the pulse metre on his finger would have begun beeping and flat-lining the minute she took it off of his finger. But she's somehow able to take it off of his finger, smother him to death and then put it back on his finger before the machine starts flat-lining. Also, his blood pressure reading was so patently fake that it made me want to choke somebody. The hospital scene in general makes me want to punch a poodle in the face just to spite the filmmakers.
The one thing keeping me from giving this a lower rating is the fact that the beginning was so strong. Had it lacked such a strong beginning before eventually fizzling out, I probably would have given this a much lower rating.