The possessed doll picture has two possible problems. Either you have a horror icon that doesn't move for the entire film, or you have one that looks kinda ridiculous when it moves. Fortunately, this one balances things out by having the possessed doll do a lot of psychic influencing all around a very creepy house in the middle of nowhere. The "creation" backstory is largely a matter of the first five minutes and a late-in-the-movie monologue - most of this story is set 12 years after the doll has been created, with a pack of young orphans and a nun moving into the house of a couple who have lost their daughter - with the wife strangely reclusive and the husband reticent, the kids soon find themselves going into a room they should not enter, and spooky mayhem ensues.
There's quite a reasonable setup of tension here. The two biggest names of the cast, Anthony La Paglia and Miranda Otto, are somewhat in the background, required only for exposition purposes as the house owners, and much of the energy is carried by a pair of youngsters - 11 year old Lulu Wilson and 14 year old Talitha Bateman. Both carry it surprisingly well - Wilson in particular is an astonishingly solid find, neither being particularly cutesey or simpering. This is very much in the style of the Conjuring films which it's a spinoff of - with a litlte spooky-house wandering and being, perhaps, a ltitle too keen on showing off the demons at the end - but it's an entertaining haunted house trip. No, theere's not a lot of depth here and you shouldn't go expecting it, but as a funhouse scare ride it's pretty solid.
No comments:
Post a Comment