Cleverly crafted, exciting, dreadful and disturbing...I saw.

Rating: 9/10 (15 October 2004)

Wow! This movie was an upper and downer for me. The score was all over the place throughout the movie, and in most circumstances that is a good thing, and it is here too.
Once you've seen the entire piece you do see that the script is excellently put together, and you are left with a shed load of questions afterwards, wondering and confused but with that childish excitement of realisation.
Well filmed, it's dark, enclosed and precise with what you should see, more and more pieces of the puzzle. There are some interesting styles of filming, but one excellent one which I am so sure I've seen before somewhere else, the use of a camera flash to repeatedly illuminate a room. It's well done, and keeps the you feeling in that closed, dark and controlled manner.
I was very happily surprised, after a couple of stock Hollywood plot points which really hit me and got me thinking I was in a poor attempt of a movie, there are surprises which just make you look wide eyed at the screen and the slow dawn of realisation. Very, very well done.
Downsides? Well, for me one was Cary Elwes. The accent and acting kept popping me back into reality every now and again. It didn't quite hit the mark of reality enough to keep me in the movie for him. However, that was far from spoiling it for me.
The two Hollywood script writing moments did annoy me though, in such a well crafted film to see these two moments which are stock library scenes dropped in merely to help the story along really did bite in, and that's what dropped the score for me. If they could have just seen that and worked something else in their place this film would have been wonderful.
Cleverly crafted, exciting, dreadful and disturbing, an excellent film that surely lets James Wan print tickets galore for himself from now on.