tek's rating:

The Uninvited (PG-13)
Amblin; Dread Central (Blu-ray/DVD); IMDb; Paramount; Revolution; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Vudu; YouTube

Caution: potential spoilers maybe.

I basically wanted to see this because it stars Emily Browning. Anyway, it came out in 2009, but I didn't see it until 2014. It's based on a 2003 Korean movie, which I haven't seen.

Browning plays a girl named Anna. At the start of the film, she's recounting a nightmare to her psychiatrist, about the night of a fire that claimed the life of her mother (who was already terminally ill). It's been ten months since the fire, after which Anna had apparently tried to kill herself, and in all this time she's been in a psychiatric hospital. But now her psychiatrist believes she's ready to go home. Things are tense at home, because her father is now romantically involved with Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), who had been working as a private nurse, taking care of Anna's mother until the fire. Anna is upset about her father's relationship with Rachel, though Rachel is apparently trying to befriend Anna. Meanwhile, Anna reconnects with her sister, Alex, who doesn't trust Rachel. Before long, Anna and Alex come to suspect the fire wasn't an accident, and that Rachel had actually murdered their mother. Also, Anna frequently has some very creepy nightmares, which sometimes seem to happen while she's awake.

I don't really want to say any more about the plot, but there's a twist near the end that I thought was pretty obvious from the start. (It's kind of Shyamalan-esque, but this movie isn't as good as a Shyamalan film. Well, some of them.) Still, there were always things I wondered about, and even if it all ended up having been just as predictable as it seemed, it was still reasonably unsettling getting to the end... and, you know, if you're really interested in being scared by a movie, this kind of plot twist is basically a two-for-one. You spend most of the movie theoretically being scared about the same stuff that's scaring the protagonist, and in the end you get to be scared about what's really been going on all along. (Hell, if you predict the plot twist, which is almost impossible not to, you can be scared of both things at the same time.) Anyway, it's not a bad movie, but not something I feel the need to ever see again.


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