Decent but flawed supernatural effort

Rating: 5/10 (23 April 2015)

Arriving at an old Victorian home, new workers looking after a woman's two bed-ridden children experience a series of ghostly happenings that questions their religious upbringing and must figure out how to stop it from continuing.
This one turned out to be an absolutely banal drama rather than a horror film, which has a lot of problems. One of the biggest issues is that nothing at all happens in here, with being just so slow and plodding that the scares hardly happen. Since nearly all the early scares or confrontations are off-camera with us coming upon their reactions or hearing about what happened, leaving this one to completely gloss over the potential main selling point by not showing anything to be afraid of and only telling us. This is compounded by all the times she keeps spouting off about their fates in Purgatory and such for failing to listen to her, her insistence on teaching and interpreting the Bible and all of the religious nonsense that permeates the film, as well as the rather ridiculous plot-point about the father coming home, which is dismissed quite suddenly and eats up several minutes of screen time going nowhere at all. Beyond the plot problems, the last act twist is just utterly confusing and makes no sense, rendering much of the film up until that point quite contradictory to what's been established and doesn't really serve a point at all. All of these issues aren't enough to save it from some rather nice points here, mainly a fine, suitably creepy Gothic mansion that serves as the perfect point for this effort, there's some generally freaky moments with the children's reactions to different events around the house and then there's the first revelation about the different workers' true past which prompts some fine action scenes for the first time and gets some chilling scenes involved. These make it worthwhile, but it's overall quite flawed.
Rated PG-13: Violence and children-in-jeopardy.