Solstice is a remake of a Swedish thriller about a young woman who believes she is being haunted by her twin sister, lost to suicide, while on a holiday with some of their mutual friends. It is very much a product of the mid aughts, in that the twist that occurs near the finale is going to be familiar to a lot of current viewers, but was not familiar to viewers who saw this back when it was released. I'm probably giving it more of a pass than it deserves because I was one of those people who saw it way back when. I recently rewatched it, and it doesn't hold up as well because that kind of plot twist has been rehashed to death by now, but I still remember how much it surprised me on initial viewing. Basically, this is the sort of ghost story where the ghost you think is doing the haunting is actually someone else tangentially connected to the one you thought was doing the haunting. You might still not guess who or why, although I bet you clock one of the guilty parties, and you probably won't be too far off on motive. This movie has an above average cast for this sort of flick, and it was filmed on location in Louisiana, because at the time Louisiana was offering very lucrative tax breaks to filmmakers, so a lot of horror movies got made there in the aughts. Movies filmed there have a certain look about them, the humidity in the air causes a shimmer you can practically see on the film. It adds something in terms of ambience. The cast also adds a lot of layers to characters who were actually not written with as many dimensions as we get. Like, why the heck are these folks not weirded out when a particular character wants to take up with the heroine? And I'm not talking about Tyler Hoechlin's character, either. It doesn't quite add up, but the actors try to give it some hidden depth anyway. All in all, when a B movie leaves you feeling some kind of way at the end, I'd say it's pretty successful at what it set out to do, even if it is objectively still a B movie.
