could have been cool but...

Rating: 6/10 (19 June 2012)

...something went dreadfully wrong here. Daniel Radcliffe is the film's Achilles heel. He just doesn't have the heft to pull off the kind of nuanced role this movie demanded. It's partially that he's too young to pull off the love-shattered widower and partly that he's simply not a compelling screen presence. Imagine this film with, say, Fassebender or Mark Ruffalo or someone of that ilk and you'll get a sense of where this movie fails. The execution is also very messy. For a Gothic tale like this to work the structure has to be very sound; but this movie becomes a morass of cheap scares at the half-way mark and never recovers. On the positive side, the atmosphere is well established, the mystery of what it is, exactly, that's haunting the town is well done, and the conclusion was surprising and effective. But I still mourn for what this movie might have been.