Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 30, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
In the mini-pantheon of Asian-horror remakes, The Uninvited winds up being more welcome than last year’s underachieving triumvirate of One Missed Call, The Eye and Shutter. Well-crafted enough that it doesn’t feel like an opportunistic knockoff, it suffers less in comparison to the Korean original, A Tale of Two Sisters, than from the fact that the story ingredients of both are familiar from numerous past genre films.
I should pause here to note that I wasn’t one of the many who admired Kim Ji-woon’s Sisters; where plenty of viewers saw a subtle suspenser that slowly but surely ratcheted up the creep factor, I saw an enervatingly paced film where not much happened—certainly not much that hadn’t been done before and better in other domestic-fear fare from Korea and Japan—and “paid off” in a show-offy, incoherent series of revelations. The Uninvited (which, to confuse things, has the same moniker as a different Korean chiller) will no doubt strike many of Sisters’ fans as an oversimplified gloss on its precursor, but this writer will take its straightforward style over Sisters’ stultifying “artfulness” any day.
The basics of the story (here adapted by Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard) remain the same: Teenaged Anna (Emily Browning) returns to her well-appointed lakeside home after a 10-month stint in a mental institution. (Not a moment too soon if therapy sessions like the one we see, in which her doctor says, “We’ve talked about the little red-headed girl, but now there’s a new detail: the watering can,” are any indication.) Traumatized after witnessing the death of her sick mother in a fire that gutted the boathouse where Mom was staying, the vulnerable Anna is happily welcomed back by her more confident sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel) and her father Steven (David Strathairn). But there’s a serpent in the garden, namely Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), the mother’s former caretaker who has stayed on in the house—and, Alex soon informs Anna, in Steven’s bed.
In Sisters, the stepmother was a cold, imperious monster, but the characterization of Rachel is less immediately sinister and, frankly, more interesting. All warmth and smiles around Steven, she’s patronizing toward Anna—at first beneath the surface of their conversations, and then in more pronounced ways. Alex is already distrustful of their dad’s new girlfriend, and the two begin to look into Rachel’s past to confirm their growing suspicions. The latter are exacerbated by frightening visions and dreams Anna suffers, one of which sees her badly burned mother literally pointing the finger at Rachel as the cause of her death.
The assorted bad dreams and other weird stuff Anna witnesses, including the inevitable spooky little girl—who at least has red hair this time instead of the usual long, black tresses—are nothing new, and the least interesting parts of The Uninvited. More effective is the war of wills that develops between Anna and Rachel, as enacted in fine turns by Browning and Banks. The former, a young Australian actress previously seen in small parts in Ghost Ship and Darkness Falls, conveys Anna’s frailties and developing strength with great sympathy, while Banks seems to be relishing the opportunity to essay a nastier role than she usually takes on, without overplaying the part. Kebbel, already a familiar genre face from The Grudge 2, Reeker and the new Red Mist, lends solid support, while Strathairn, though unavoidably overqualified for his generally functional part, gives it a sense of gravity nonetheless.
The Uninvited was directed, in their feature debut, by short film/commercial veterans the Guard Brothers (Charles and Thomas), who here demonstrate a nice eye for detail, composition and evocative lighting, assisted in no small amount by cinematographer Daniel Landin. The latter makes the most of both the resplendent Vancouver-area locations and Andrew Menzies’ equally lush production design of the family mansion. Equally rich is Christopher Young’s old-fashioned suspense score (with a few echoes of his Hellraiser compositions), though both his music as well as the Guard’s direction become too on-the-nose during the movie’s more blatant shock moments.
The Guards do their best to hint at what’s really going on in the household without fully giving the game away, though some viewers who pay close attention to certain scenes may figure it out in advance. Nonetheless, the final round of revelations brings satisfying closure and a touch of chill to The Uninvited’s conclusion—enough to make one hope that the directors and their team are invited back to the genre with truly fresh material next time around.
