Review of The Uninvited

The Uninvited is yet another American re-make of a very good Asian horror film, in this case the moody, beautiful Korean film "A Tale of Two Sisters". Most of these fail miserably (if not at the box-office, then often with critics) for an array of reasons, but the Uninvited manages to side-step the most offensive ones. For one thing, the film-makers here can't be accused of laziness. They seem to have actually taken some care and consideration in adapting this story. Vision is another problem that seems to plague other re-makes, whereas the Uninvited has a clear and confident enough vision from the outset so as to aid the film in aesthetic ways (set-design, makeup, visual style etc.) as well as in regard to story-telling. Here we have many classic film motifs and suspense elements at play: the evil step-mother figure, teen-age angst/rebellion vs. suggestions of actual psychosis, distorted vs. reliable memory, to name a few, and the movie handles all of them relatively well, mostly by steering close enough to tried and true methods, but also veering off onto its own way with instances of success. The performances could definately stand improvement, and while the script doesn't always do the actors much in the way of favors, it's not entirely to blame. Luckily some generally good dream/hallucination sequences show up just often enough to divert our attention from the less favorable aspects of the movie and we are treated to a few suprisingly decent creep-out moments and moments of nifty camera work and photography. Not great, probably doesn't even warrant a second viewing, but exceeded my expectations.