Naomi Watts is still awesome

Rating: Null/10 (26 October 2002)

If you cut 30 minutes out of this, you might have a tight, scary B movie, but it spends so much time on investigating a back story that, when you come down to it, doesn't really matter much. When they're not wasting time on the back story, they're padding out the action with long scenes of Naomi Watts driving somewhere or looking at things and of random shots of a tree on a hill, which is also not as important as it seems. It is also shot in that ugly, slightly blueish greenish tint that for some reason seems to be so popular now in movies like Panic Room and Amelie. What the film does have is some occasional frightening imagery, including the videotape itself, which is a masterpiece of nightmarish surrealism, like Carl Dreyer's Vampyr. Why couldn't the rest of the film have shown that kind of economical terror? ** out of ****