TRULY Beyond the Door

Rating: Null/10 (11 August 2001)

I've heard it said that the scariest thing you can show in a film is a closed door.
I've never fully appreciated the incipient dread suggested by that premise until I saw this film today. Imagine an entire haunted house movie filled with closed doors -and they make a grand show of telling you that all the doors are closed!
Why? Why close the doors? What's behind them, hmmm?
And THAT's where the real fear factor in this film comes from; there's always something on the other side of that door...or that one...or upstairs...
Never since the chillingly atmospheric -and now utterly forgotten- ghost stories of the 1940's and Val Lewton have I seen a film which relied so much on characters and settings and ACTING to create its terror. Nicole Kidman is perfectly cast as the "modern" 1940's woman battling unseen agents of malice directed against her and her children.
No cheap monsters, no digital wraiths, no dismembered corpses or dripping pools of blood. Just lots of fog, strange noises, closed doors, hallways, empty rooms, candles, darkness and the inexorable terror of what you CAN'T see, what you DON'T see ---and all the horrors which your imagination can create.
An excellent return to what ghost stories should be! BRAVO