The not-so-eerie tale of two stupid twins.
Standard ghost story of a young couple moving into a new house, the kind of cliché premise that's as common as whiny pop ballads dominating MTV's charts. So standard and common that it contains no real thrills, at least not for the experienced horror fan, because it goes through all the same motions as other such films. Also, this one has a bit of a bland feel to it.
The writing is somewhat better than the direction. The main twist about a woman moving into the house of the man who murdered her twin sister many years earlier - while not knowing about the murderer - is a pretty solid idea, certainly better than most ghost-flick explanations/motives/twists. I am curious as to why the two writers (who cast themselves as the couple) chose to make the couple so blasé about discovering a ghost in the house. The opposite of blasé - constant screaming - isn't the right way to go either because it's so corny let alone annoying, but the blasé option is problematic in its own right. The couple is way too relaxed about discovering a ghost. The husband actually has sex with the ghost, yet doesn't seem traumatized about this after he finds out it wasn't his wife. (He may be secretly happy, we don't know.) Nor is his wife Emily. They are way too chill, and so is their friend, the soon-to-be-murdered childhood friend of Emily.
I also really struggle to understand why Emily needed so long to put two and two together, to figure out that her dead sister was murdered by the former house owner and that she was playing hide-and-seek with her as a ghost. Now, before you start moaning (about silly ghosts doing their generic and pointless hide-and-seeking), let me tell you that this movie ghost, unlike all the others, has a proper reason to play hide-and-seek with her victims: Anna (stupidly spelled Annah) disappeared aged 6 while playing hide-and-seek with her twin sister Emily. (Not spelled Emillee, for some reason.) So while ghosts are notorious for playing utterly senseless games of hide-and-seek in other haunted-house films, at least here that game has a logical rationale behind it. That's a plus.
Another minus though would be the utter predictability in Anna(h) replacing her sister, taking her place alongside Emily's husband who suspects nothing. (Or at least he doesn't when the movie ends i.e. not straight away). That evil grin that escapes Anna's face in the final scene, who couldn't foretell that? Especially after the husband found her standing speechless in front of the house. Too obvious. In fact, some viewers were probably even smarter than me (hard to imagine, I know) hence had predicted this switcheroo plot-twist even earlier, perhaps much earlier.
But how happy will Emily's evil dead twin, Anna, be in her "new life" in land of the living, impersonating her sister? Answer: not very. The reason is simple: because the cops will find Emily's BFF's mutilated carcass in the house, hence they will arrest Anna (and possibly her "new" husband too). Did the film-makers take this (later) development into consideration? I suspect not, or perhaps they were just happy with the ending they picked and decided not to concern either themselves or the audience with the fate of the couple AFTER the cops find the corpse. Hence the woman's murder was wholly unnecessary because it begs an epilogue which isn't offered by the writers, not even vaguely hinted at.
Hence, in a sense, Anna is just as thick as her twin sister Emily. Anna should have left Emily's friend alive and unhurt, because that way her new existence among the living would be possible, it would have some potential - at least until her unsuspecting husband starts suspecting something due to Anna's obvious evil tendencies. Certainly the decision not to murder the BFF (whom Anna never even knew) would prevent a very likely 30-year prison sentence. Basically, Anna the biatch-ghost didn't play her cards right at all, she totally screwed up. Additional evidence that Anna is a very dumb ghost is that she blames Emily for her demise, which is asinine logic because Emily has zero fault in Anna's murder. The third piece of evidence that Anna is a moron is her very literal interpretation of "hide where I can never find you" (Emily's words to her). Which 6 year-old would go and hide in a distant neighbour's house in a game of hide-and-seek? Only a very dumb child would. I was a kid too once (believe it or not) and I too played hide-and-seek, but never did I travel miles to "not be found" because even at a very young age I understood that the purpose of the game wasn't to travel to the nearby town or get a passport and move to another country. Monty Python have a sketch called "Hide-and-seek Olympics" and it is almost biographical in terms of how stupidly Anna decided to play the game.
The fact that Emily took a very long time to figure out the obvious truth, plus the fact that she went back to the house despite the obvious dangers, means that both twins are pretty stupid. So I guess their "mutual" husband isn't getting that much of a different wife in Anna, huh? He is getting the same levels of non-intelligence in Anna as he had in Emily. And of course they look and sound the same, they're twins. He had sex with Anna already and noticed nothing unusual, so the twins are similar or same that way too. The only difference is that Anna is evil, which might manifest itself in interesting ways. A sequel perhaps?
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