Not good (POSSIBLE SPOILER)

Rating: 4/10 (10 April 2000)

As I watched this I became increasingly exasperated by its failure to go anywhere, indeed by the impossibility of its going anywhere because of the plot gimmick it saddled itself with. The gimmick is clumsily concealed, requires cheating throughout (some of which the film tries to excuse by making up its own "rules" as it goes), and was a bad idea from the outset, making the story ultimately silly. The construction of the script is deformed accordingly.
And it isn't a skillful script: much of the dialogue is awkward, many of the characters' lines and actions are unprepared for and are never followed up on, and almost any moment that works superficially seems false and unfelt, and is usually contradicted by something else later on.
Fortunately, the direction is better than the writing. I recall at least three good moments, all due to performances of supporting players. But the leading actors are all miscast--even the kid--and the visuals are a catalog of borrowings from other, better ghost movies.
More fundamentally, this film goes against a central rule of fantasy: fantasy says openly that what is not so is so, and if the reader or viewer rejects it, so much the worse for him. It doesn't try to con its audience, to put something over on them. And I should say that that is even more true of sentimental fantasy. If it has to trick people into accepting it by impersonating a horror film (and inserting twenty minutes of one into itself so it can be sold that way), it shows scant confidence in the genre it has chosen, matching its scant skill in manipulating the conventions of that genre. Ghost didn't need to pretend to be The Shining.
I like ghost stories and sentimental fantasies; this is an uncomprehending and, in my view, insincere example of both.