Not what I remembered...

Rating: 1/10 (5 January 2020)

Saw this for the first time in years and it wasn't the movie I remembered loving. Every scene goes on far too long. The dialogue takes the longest way to get to the point. And every dialogue scene is only two shots and becomes very boring after a while.
Many shots are very long and just cut after nothing happening. The suspense builds with nothing actually happening. Look at the first three shots of the movie, we only needed one of those. The shots are very boring too. Nothing interesting on terms of framing. And other than the Steadicam shots the camera hardly moves in an annoying way.
Examples: when Jack is locked in the cellar and the ghost is talking to him, that scene could be half the length. That scene basically happens twice. Grady tells him what to do, Jack says he'll do it and then they repeat this again. When the wife looks at all of his typed pages. It just keeps going after the point has been made. The chase at the end goes on for so long and becomes redundant very quickly.
The acting is all over the place. Every actor is in a different movie. Some people act like they're in a commercial and others act like they're in a horror movie. They're not bad, they're just in different movies.
The script needed another pass at it and the movie needed another edit. I have not read the book and I used to love this movie.