Perhaps the best horror movie of all time

Rating: 9/10 (7 June 2005)

Well, maybe not the very very best, but it has to be very close to it. Excellent pacing, visually hypnotic, tight tight plot, surreal atmosphere. It's right up there with Psycho and exorcist.
OK, maybe it does have a some weaknesses. Maybe it depends a bit too much on built-in Hollywood horror mythology. It doesn't explain a lot, or offer any kind of substantive framework for how this happens. I mean this is all in the mind, in the realm of ghosts and psychic stuff. I mean, it works, and very well, but it could never happen.
Really, horror movies like Psycho are better, because that could have actually happened.
This movie is just way out there in ghostland.
But the visual effect is simply tour de force stuff. A beautiful movie. Not all THAT original, like I said--in a way it depends on a huge framework of Hollywood horror clichés. But the visual world is alluring. Sort of reminds me of Jacob's Ladder, what with the way it slips from a totally realistic workaday world into surreal otherworld.