Fridae

Two long haired little girls, bloodied and fragile, looking out at the audience from eerily Victorian wallpaper. The poster for Dream House now on display seems to scream that it’s trying to evoke Korean horror with its love of domestic settings, females in trouble and love of mock-Gothic mood. Complete with the beloved twist and trick endings.

While you’re again moaning at how Hollywood can’t seem to shake its fetish for Asian horror again while not catching up on the writing or the suspense levels while revealing the twist ending in the trailer, be assured, for those who have seen this film’s now oft-broadcast trailer that the twist ending telegraphed is not the most important one.

Daniel Craig plays editor Will Attenton, who leaves his lucrative job at a publishing house to start a new life as a writer under the support of his loving wife Libby (Rachel Weisz) and his two daughters. However, soon he realizes that his family are stalked by a creepy presence, and he will do just about anything to protect them. When he finds out that a man named Peter Ward lived there once and was accused of murdering his entire family, he goes to the psychiatric hospital Peter Ward stayed in, only to be told he is Peter Ward...

For those of you who feel that the twist may have been spoiled there, let me reassure you that it isn’t. The film cleverly avoids it by turning the rest of the movie into Will/Peter’s quest to find out if he is really Peter or Will, and who the real murderer of his family is. It is its clumsiness in doing so that is deeply unsatisfying. While director Jim Sheridan tries to keep the status of Will’s family ambivalent (are they ghosts, hallucinations or something else?), his lack of experience with horror (his filmography reveals himself to be mostly a dramatic filmmaker) is present throughout this whole movie, right down to how he resolves the film in a ridiculously melodramatic fashion, with an ending that might just have you groaning in your seat. It doesn’t help that the murder mystery within the film is so easy to crack if but for the fact that the murder has but one barely likely suspect.

This Dream House builds itself on flaky sand. See it if to be unexpectedly amused.