Excellent, with astonishing performences **** out of five

Rating: 8/10 (5 November 2001)

This really is a good old-fashioned ghost story. It dosen't use special effects to scare (using visuals to scare dosen't work usually anyway) this uses atmosphere. For instance creaking doors etc, maybe your saying to yourself thats not scary thats a clice. But if you do think that way I would still think you would like this- no electricity, no phones, no radios. This is a deep and haunting tale. Nicole Kidman gives a tour-de-force performence. While the childern Alakina Mann as Anne and James Bentley as Nicholas give truly excellent performences- but theey're still not as good as Haley Joel Osment. All the cast are good really. Now the flaw many will have is its resemblence to another film I won't tell you what film- but really I over-looked that because I don't think the writer Alejandro Amenabar set out to steal from the other film. I highly reccomend you to get to your cinema to see this, if you haven't already you don't know what your missing out on. **** out of five.