Mildly Unsettling

Rating: 3/10 (17 June 2008)

Yeah.
Kinda moody here and there, kinda liked the kid coming up out the well, liked the way she came out the TV. Nearly worked. Liked the flickery look of her, like she was made of TV. That was kinda cool.
Liked the horse on the ferry, nearly worked with those worrying cellos thumping away a la "Jaws".
But, um, its got that problem that movies have now, where everything's in the Modern Style, desaturated images, tastefully composed shots of grime and electric cables looking more like a still life in an art gallery than a scene from a movie, blurry shots of eeeevil Samara in the asylum, BEAUTIFULLY composed and tinted, making me think "oooh how tasteful and elegant" not "cripes, what a creepy little girl". My poor brain won't do "arrg scary" at the same time as it's doing "oooo tasteful". During that bit where they find her room in the barn with the cute little TV like something out of a spooooooky sort of Calvin and Hobbes strip (it had cutely angled little ariels like a friendly grasshopper) and the little carousel and her little bed all uniformly tinted in pale browns and faded sour creams I thought, how EVOCATIVE. How MYSTERIOUS. And how thoroughly FAKE LOOKING. Such a perfect, sweet little theatre set - it would have been beautiful on a stage but in the movie it just looks like something that would have been beautiful on a stage.
If you over-stylise these things, they stop being scary and just become static, like images in a gallery. They're lovely to look at, but why not just make images and put them in a gallery? They'd work better and probably actually be scarier. It's fine to overdo the interior deco in a fantasy film or a comedy or a sci fi flick, but not a horror movie, horror movies have to be real, nail-scrapingy, eye-bulgingly real. Reality isn't tasteful or well-composed. Or cunningly tinted to look older than it is.
Having said all that, the girl coming out the TV nearly worked, because it's supposed to be supernatural.
Guys, horror movies have rules.
Also, no, no, no, filmmakers, don't add pointless subplots about parents trying to reunite for the sake of their kid. It's a horror movie, not a chick flick.
3 stars, all 3 for Samara coming out the well, which, had I been significantly younger and had seen fewer horror movies, would probably have been quite scary.