A massive missed opportunity

Rating: 3/10 (11 August 2012)

The ingredients were there to make a film equal to The Innocents or The Haunting, or even equal to the original television adaptation. However, they seem to have gone overboard on CGI and given in to a 21st century need to explain everything, even to the point of changing the original book, in order to satisfy some target audience they have identified. But their target audience would appear to be one they don't trust to make their own mind up about what is scary.
There was so much monochrome CGI work it may as well have been shot in black and white - the original version managed to portray 'forboding' and 'bleak' without painting everything grey; its a pity the makers this time took the easy way out. They seem to have lost any trust in their audience - no matter whether any suspense had been built up or not, the ghost arrived with a shattering BANG in the musical score and a loud scream - thats not sinister, ghostly, eerie or particularly scary; thats just making people jump for the sake of it, as if they had no confidence in an audience losing themselves to suspense. Once is fine, but 5 or 6 times? A deserted house is scary, an ominous shadowy figure in black is scary - yet they abandoned any attempt create unease by using the ingredients they already had and just went for a loud shock.
But the biggest let down was the final twenty minutes or so. This being made in the 21st century we are presented with a Victorian man deciding that of course the ghost actually needs 'closure'. The following scenes are ludicrous, rather pointless and have been added purely for this film. The final scene fails completely; there are so many problems with it that its amazing it wasn't re-shot.
Overall it comes across as a film written and made by people who have no idea about suspense or horror; its modern film making by numbers. This could have been an instant classic, but as it is, its no better than the likes of Final destination 3.