'Uninvited' delivers tale of escalating tension
The Guard Brothers' moody little gothic drama "The Uninvited" doesn't care about grossing us out with graphic violence or scaring us with another generic, masked, knife-wielding boogeyman.
Nope, this domestic horror tale, a remake of Kim Jee-Woon's 2003 South Korean release "Changhwa Hongryon," prefers to wrap us in an environment of escalating tension with spine-chilling ghostly apparitions and creepy, tactile moments such as a girl slowly walking barefoot down a carpeted staircase saturated with fresh blood.
You can practically feel the liquid squishing between her toes. Yechhhhh!
The cheesy clichés of the genre - a hand suddenly grabbing someone's shoulder, or a cat abruptly lurching into the frame - are conspicuously absent here, although the Guard Brothers, Thomas and Charles of Great Britain, liberally borrow elements from horror hits such as "Psycho," "The Sixth Sense" and "Sisters" to create a moderately amusing suspense thriller that enjoys messing with our perceptions.
"The Uninvited" opens with teenage Anna ("Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" star Emily Browning) being released from a mental facility. Ten months earlier, she apparently tried to commit suicide after her bedridden mother died in a fiery explosion in the family's guesthouse in Maine.
Once home, Anna reunites with her spunky, party-happy sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel), her self-centered novelist father Steven (David Strathairn) and his fiancee Rachel ("W." and "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" star Elizabeth Banks), who used to be Mother's nurse at the time of her death.
Anna has been plagued by nightmares of animated body parts in garbage bags, and the ghosts of three children who follow her around. Now, she begins to see a vision of her mother's scorched corpse that cries out to her, "Murder!" and points her charbroiled finger in the direction of nurse Rachel.
"It was her!" Anna shouts. Alex, who thought her father and Rachel were disgusting for having sex in the den while her mother suffered in the guesthouse, doesn't have to be convinced that Rachel orchestrated the fiery disaster so she could get her hooks into the novelist.
They make a pinkie swear to stop Rachel before another tragedy occurs. But being teenage girls with little experience in such matters, Rachel overhears the plan and sets out to thwart it.
It wouldn't be fair to say more about the plot of "The Uninvited," except that it has nothing in common with the 1944 minor classic, Ray Milland/Ruth Hussey ghost story of the same title. (IMDB.com lists at least 12 projects with this title, not counting the independent feature made by local Palatine filmmakers CMGM two years ago. Can't we put this title on moratorium?)
There is an unsettling twinge of Oedipal conflict in the daughters' hatred of Dad's younger sex partner, although the Guard brothers wisely don't linger on it.
Lingering falls to Christopher Young's score, a conventional collection of dissonance and furious, mounting tensions that pushes the narrative along with ominous anticipation.
Some viewers might be angry at the ending of "The Uninvited." Others will delight in going back over the film to chart clues and check for internal inconsistencies.
Either way, you can't take a horror tale too seriously when it contains Alex's comment to her sister, "Excuse me, but I'm not the one who saw her dead mother point her finger at her dad's creepy girlfriend!"
'The Uninvited'
Rating: 2½ stars
Starring: Emily Browning, David Strathairn, Elizabeth Banks, Arielle Kebbel
Directed by: Charles Guard and Thomas Guard
Other: A DreamWorks Films release. Rated PG-13 for language, teen drinking, sexual references and violence. 87 minutes