Tuesday, October 17, 2017

NETFLIX AND KILL: DREAM HOUSE (2011) ** ½


Dream House is a ghost story rife with haunted house movie clichés.  We’ve seen movies where a family moves into an old house where the former tenants were brutally murdered.  We’ve seen horror movies where a child’s ominous drawings act as harbingers of doom.  We’ve seen horror movies where the husband is an author who’s trying to get a little writing done, but ghosts and madness eventually get in the way.  Sure, we’ve seen all of this before, but this time we get to see it with James Bond in the lead.  

Dream House comes to us from director Jim Sheridan.  His filmography is all over the place.  He made a big splash with dramas like My Left Foot, but he’s also directed the 50 Cent movie, Get Rich or Die Trying.  He doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, but he handles all the would-be scares in a competent manner. 

Despite the overly familiar set-up, Dream House does have at least one good twist.  What sets it apart from countless other similar films is that the twist happens about halfway through the movie.  Though predictability finds its way back into the third act, the intriguing twist and its unconventional placement in the narrative prevents it from being just another run-of-the-mill haunted house flick.   

The performances are solid and help to anchor the movie throughout its cliché-heavy passages.  Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz have a lot of chemistry together.  So much so that they wound up falling in love and getting married shortly before the film was released.  Naomi Watts also leaves an impression as a concerned neighbor, although I wish she was given more to do.

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