Dream House Review
As always this will contain spoilers, so if you have not seen this movie, and you want to, skip down to the final rating to avoid the spoilers.
The film centers around a Will Atenton that just quit his high paying job as an editor to write a novel, and move with his family to a small town. His wife and 2 daughters are fixing up a rundown house they bought which apparently has a dark past. A family was murdered and the father, Peter Ward, was placed in a psychiatric hospital and blamed for the murders.
As the film hits the halfway point we are thrust into a world of shadows and fantasy as we learn that the man accused of killing his family and put in the asylum was actually himself, and that this life is all a dream created by his fractured psyche after he was shot in the head during the murders.
Then the film just stops.... Seriously, once we learn this from a doctor at the asylum, everything just sort of ends there, and he stops the hallucinations almost instantly, and believes everything without hesitation, and goes on to find who really killed his family even if the answer leads back to him.
A few more minutes and we find out it was the neighbor who is to blame. He is a jealous and petty man that has a terrible relationship with his ex-wife, and wants sole custody of his daughter. The man as we see him in the first few minutes of the film is transparently evil. All he needs is to hold up a sign that says "I'm the bad guy".
He is played by Marton Csokas (the perennial bad guy), and tells Ward that he hired a thug played by Elias Koteas to kill his own wife and collect the insurance money. The thug broke into the wrong house, and killed Ward's family. They struggle as Csokas starts to burn the house down with his Wife and Ward still inside. Urged by the ghost of his wife, Ward gets up, and fights of the evil neighbor and the hired thug leaving them to burn in the house, at which point the film abruptly ends. Seriously the movie just fades to credits with him walking away from the house.
Here are my problems with this:
He has no hesitation about what the doctor tells him, he totally believes him, even though he does in fact go back into the fantasy world one more time. If it was this easy to snap him out of it why didn't anybody do this before
He doesn't really do much searching as he starts to remember on his own what happened. Sure the neighbor tells him she doesn't believe he did it, and that triggers more memories. But it wasn't handled well.
The film ends with no resolution whatsoever and blatantly ignores the two men inside the house which granted were the bad guys, but were left to burn to death. I'm sure the police will find it interesting to find two charred bodies in the house of a crazy man suspected of having killed his own family.
The real problem however, is that they forget all about his hallucinatory stages as he just accepts he's seeing things and even though he continues to talk to his dead wife and daughters there really isn't that much emotional connection to them anymore if you know they aren't real.
At the end I felt that this movie should have delivered much more. It was ridiculously short at merely an hour and a half long, and they could have easily used another hour simply to fully explore the fantasy world and have it break down a little slower. Have him return to reality after he himself starts to realize its not real. Not have some doctor who would have done this while Ward was under his care plenty of times. They never thought to show him footage of himself before to break him out of it?
All in all its not a bad movie, its just disappointingly short and direct to the very abrupt end with no kind of resolution or proper ending to it. It very lightly tells you whats going on, and then ends.
Comments
Post a Comment