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Kate Hudson.
Gena Rowlands. Pseudo-Thriller.
Synopsis: A
young hospice worker takes a position caring for a dying man in
an expansive Louisiana mansion that might be haunted.
Review: Not
good. Wait for Netflix.
Seriously. This movie
has not one, but two, inaccurate marketing campaigns working in
its favor. The first is the responsibility of the makers of the
film - numerous television spots touting this film as a "return
to the classic psychological thriller" and "the best thriller
since The Sixth Sense ." Neither of those characterizations
is correct. The second marketing campaign has been unwittingly unleashed
by the film critics of America who, despite giving the film average
or slightly lower than average marks, keep praising the film’s
twist ending.
I am going to counter
both campaigns with the following sentence - this film is far from
a psychological thriller and there is no twist ending.
I’m going to repeat
that last clause - there is no twist ending. If a viewer doesn’t
see the ending that is to come somewhere around the middle of the
film, he or she just hasn’t developed enough critical thinking
skills. Or perhaps the viewer left the theatre for 10-15 minutes
at least twice during the film’s first hour and 15 minutes.
Seriously. If the ‘twist’
ending hasn’t come
completely into focus somewhere around the 1-hour mark, it should
be crystal clear about 25 minutes before the end of film. Interestingly
enough, that’s about the same time the film becomes engaging.
Caroline (Hudson) is
a young hospice worker in New Orleans with issues surrounding her
own father’s sudden death and the unresolved issues between
them. After another beloved patient dies in an unsympathetic hospital,
she decides to take on something more meaningful.
She responds to an ad
for a hospice worker at a mansion in the swamps outside New Orleans.
She is met by Luke (Peter Sarsgaard), the family’s estate
attorney. He explains that Ben (John Hurt) has had a stroke and
is not expected to last the month.
Ben’s wife is Violet
(Rowlands), who is skeptical of the young woman’s abilities.
She reluctantly agrees to hire Caroline, and gives her a skeleton
key to all of the doors in the mansion.
Oh yeah, except one.
The door to the barricaded room in the attic.
And our young heroine
is hell-bent on getting into that room, so eventually she does.
She finds a lot of strange bottles with ‘things’ floating
in them, masks, dusty old phonograph records, and what purports
to be a spell book of some kind.
Voodoo, one might ask?
No. As we learn from this movie, voodoo is a religion. This is hoodoo
- a byproduct of voodoo and the black arts, apparently created in
Louisiana.
Anyway, hoodoo doesn’t
work on someone unless they believe in hoodoo. Caroline is from
New Jersey, so she’s pretty much a non-believer, but events
that occur in the house cause her to have a change of heart.
Many of those events
surround Ben trying to communicate with Caroline. He is trying to
ask for help, but the stroke has left him an invalid. So Caroline
begins to suspect that Violet has done something to harm Ben.
Caroline learns more
and more but never quite puts all the pieces in the right places
(which is why I suspect that everyone is calling this a twist ending)
until it’s almost too late.
Kate Hudson keeps getting
billed as an A-list actress because of one performance in one film.
Her performance here should help bring that reputation more in alignment
with reality.
Gena Rowlands is good,
but John Hurt is excellent. Even without speaking, he is captivating
as the stroke victim.
What separates this film
from what its producers have marketed so well is really just one
thing. They needed to hire someone to sit through the storyboarding
sessions and the screenplay review. This individual’s only
responsibility would have been to utter the following sentence three
or four times: "Guys, now would be a good time for something
scary to happen."
That obviously never
took place.
OVERALL
GRADE: C-
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