Supernatural Thriller, worth a watch

Rating: 6/10 (28 August 2001)

(Spoilers . . . ?)
To liken this movie to _The Sixth Sense_ is almost to give too much of this away, but the similarities are all too obvious once you've seen it. In other words, if you liked _The Sixth Sense_, you may like this one even better.
The only question is: what are you overlooking the entire time that would give away the secret? I was thinking that myself about halfway through, as I really KNEW something like that was coming, but what exactly that was, was pretty hard to tell. For the most part it's a mystery with a seemingly incongruous plot line, and if you haven't guessed already (and you'd already guess about 20 minutes in), there is something about likely interactions between living and dead -- only this does _The Sixth Sense_ one better, in that it really doesn't give you much in the way of clues (until the end) about just what is the nature of the interaction.
As the movie develops, though, there is quite a chilling sense about it, given the way that the mother and her two children living in the mansion (the characters and location around which the movie centers) live their lives. A couple scenes are downright macabre, a term Nicole Kidman's character uses in just one of those very macabre scenes, without the need for the oft-used tactic of the instant scare to make you jump in your seat (though it's employed a couple times here). The movie builds up the suspense quite well as it progresses.
All in all, I came out of the theater pretty satisfied, though -- like _The Sixth Sense_ -- once you've seen it, you've seen it as many times as you need to in order to get the suspense. One thing that counts against it for me is my aversion to heavy reliance on the supernatural in a film to make sense of the plot. (I don't believe in anything supernatural myself, but even if I did, I doubt I'd appreciate its use as a significant plot device.) Unlike Kubrick's _The Shining_ (my favorite horror film, and perhaps not incidentally, one that places little to no explicit reliance on any supernatural elements), it leaves little room for mystery/ambiguity/wonderment at the end, and becomes all too similar to the standard "ghost story."
In any event, being that this is quite good overall (it might even get Oscar consideration, just as _The Sixth Sense_ did), but not profoundly great, I give this one a 7 out of 10.