Insultingly Bad and Ultimately In Bad Taste

Rating: 1/10 (31 July 2004)

Okay, I did not expect much from this film and there were no satisfying surprises for me, either. My wife put it best: M. Night tries to make films that will appeal to an intellectual audience but is not as smart or clever as the audience he thinks he is appealing to, so his movies just seem silly or dumb. Anyone going to this thinking it is a horror movie is bound to be disappointed - although there are monsters in this film, it seems as if the writer/director actually FAILS to recognize them for what they are: sadly misguided misanthropes who are so smugly self-centered that they feel their piece of fabled security is worth the despicably glib manner in which they utterly fail their children... but that is another story. This movie plays upon our collective desire for a safe place in the worst, most cloying post-9/11 way, and if it were not for some of the most wooden dialogue outside of an Ed Wood movie making this the director's most laughable film yet, there would be little to distract from the ugliness of the picture.
Rarely have there been films where you find actors struggling as hard to make dialogue believable (and by the end, it is impossible to believe that the characters would have naturally talked that way). I saw the ending reveal a mile away (from the preview even, though just because I'm a touch cynical and tried predicting what "surprise" ending was going to be in store). But forgiving that, and respecting that the director clearly uses genre material to draw his audience in with the hope of achieving something which, alas, his talent is not able to deliver, it is still hard to forgive the movie as a whole. I will grant that it is beautifully shot and has one interesting character and maybe three good performances. But it has a truly dreadful story, full of attempts at suspense that lead nowhere, and a sickening final act wherein the movie's true monsters present to themselves the error of their ways and completely miss the mark. In the end, there is no moral message here, although it plays as though there is. So much the sadder for the audience.
Leaving the theater, we heard lots of grumbling, not a single nice thing being said about the movie. This was the Saturday night crowd. And who are the movie's true monsters? Here's the spoiler for you: the creative team that put it together and the distributor who has marketed it for you, the moviegoing public.