Walk through nightmare as walls are torn

Rating: Null/10 (24 April 2015)

Don't come to this for any other reason than doom-laden atmospheres in an abandoned town where a girl has been lost and a mysterious siren blares come nightfall, signaling nightmare. Come to it because film for you - and horror - is about exploration in the dark.
Much has been made about how it's confusing to follow, even by serious critics. I'm perplexed at this. It's fantasy, which means you'll have to accept things as you discover them to be, shifts in fathoming, here that we have drifted into this other realm roamed by monsters.
Two things remain to be said. One is that it was originally a video game, they tried to translate as best they could. I find that it works well, even in surrogate form, bringing it in line with the essence of Gothic horror where power of persuasion was derived from someone exploring an old dark house with a candelabra at hand while floors creaked and not the story of explanations about why or where you really 'are'; horror must confound questions of being and psychology.
The other is that Freud has bedeviled horror for too long. We see the wide penetration of mechanistic Freudian thinking every time we see in a horror film some other psychic or supernatural realm someone must enter to apprehend traumatizing evil, no need to look further than Insidious and that whole slew of films that goes back to Poltergeist. Stephen King's whole trade. Texas Chainsaw offered a radically more powerful conception on the other end, and so did Blairwitch, but I harp on this in other comments.
Suffice here to say that horror is a mode of persuasion that floors are creaking as we sense, and here I get the separate twilight zone (a husband subplot to reinforce it) and a story that explains stuff about the elders of the town and a horrible secret from a dark past, repressed and surfacing, all of which don't do much in its favor. In the original format questions of order surely vanished in the air of playing through evil that envelops, or perhaps impressed in a different way, but all told this is ambitious work that retains enough of that gloomy submersion to make haunting spill over, horror I endorse over most of what comes out. The game must have been a trip to play.