An average movie

Since this movie had been really poorly received, I didn’t expect much from the damned thing but since it was directed by Joe Wright and since there was a solid cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out anyway. Well, probably because I was expecting something so awful, to be honest, I didn’t think it was so bad after all. Indeed, even if it was nothing really original, it was interesting to see a movie dealing with agoraphobia and Amy Adams gave another solid performance as she was completely convincing playing a middle-age woman cloistered at home and isolated from the rest of the world. Seriously, if they would have focused more on her deteriorating state of mind, the damned thing could have been actually really good. Unfortunately, well, pretty much nothing else really worked though. Indeed, the first mistake they made was to add way too many characters and sub-plots. I mean, for someone suffering from agoraphobia, she had actually a very busy house with random people showing up pretty much every day unannounced. It might be a small detail but, for example, why did her shrink would treat her at home and not remotely by video-call? Then, you had her tenant who had so much going on that they could have built up a whole movie around this character. Finally, wasn’t it rather ridiculous that her new neighbor (the kid, his mother and his father) would show up all randomly, one by one, separately? Anyway, what pretty much ruined the whole thing was the ending though. Indeed, they picked up the killer completely randomly (seriously, it could have been just as well one of the detectives) and, to make things worse, as a child psychologist, shouldn’t she have detected that there was something wrong with this boy? Above all, I really hate it when they spend the whole duration trying to provide a realistic portrayal of a person suffering from an actual mental disease to end up saying that, in fact, this character was right all along. Furthermore, if you would believe this movie, the best way to cure a massive trauma is to undergo another massive traumatic experience which is obviously rather ridiculous. Anyway, to conclude, I might have been too generous with my rating here but, even if they pretty much messed up the damned thing, I still think it actually had some potential.